The Blood Of Revolution

Ignore Christine O’Donnell. She is either a wonderful heroic woman or a tawdry nutjob. She is either a sure loser (like Scott Brown, Marco Rubio, Sharon Angle, Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell), and a Tea Party/Palin mistake or a possible winner. None of that really matters.

What matters is the people. It is very possible, as many historians assert, that Marie Antoinette is a misunderstood historical figure. But the “real” Marie Antoinette does not matter. What matters was the tumult in the streets of Paris, not what was happening in the castle.

After last night if we are to lament, if we are to question, our lamentation and question should be “where are the Dimocratic carcasses hanging from the lampposts of revolutionary America?” In revolutionary France during the 1700s priests hung from streetlamps like Christmas decorations on a Macy’s tree. Where are our decorations? It’s only Republicans with the joy of such ghoulish decorations these days.

“Carl P. Paladino, a Buffalo multimillionaire who jolted the Republican Party with his bluster and belligerence, rode a wave of disgust with Albany to the nomination for governor of New York on Tuesday, toppling Rick A. Lazio, a former congressman who earned establishment support but inspired little popular enthusiasm. [snip]

“We are mad as hell,” Mr. Paladino said in a halting but exuberant victory speech in Buffalo shortly after 11 p.m. “New Yorkers are fed up. Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people’s revolution. The people have had enough.”

Referring to criticism from what he said were liberal elites, he added: “They say I am too blunt. Well, I am, and I don’t apologize for it. They say I am an angry man, and that’s true. We are all angry.”’

Paladino overwhelmingly crushed the Hillary hater Rick Lazio. Lazio was a sure loser to the $24 million dollar bankrolled Andrew Cuomo in New York, the last bastion of Obama Dimocrats (deep blue Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy and deep blue California leads a Republican resurgence).

“Mr. Paladino’s platform calls for cutting taxes by 10 percent in six months, eliminating cherished public pensions for legislators, and using eminent domain to prevent the construction of a mosque and community center near ground zero. Those proposals could make Mr. Cuomo’s farthest-reaching reform ideas seem meek by comparison.”

The Republican Party establishment is in retreat as the Tea Party “peasants with pitchforks” take to the streets and the ballot box. After last night’s peevish assaults on the results in Delaware, today the national party heads faced with a dripping red Guillotine, backtracked. After at least eight races in which their nominee was defeated the Republican establishment had better wake up and smell the brewing Tea.

“Voters grabbed their pitchforks Tuesday night and came over the ramparts. The revolution has arrived. Republican primary voters Tuesday night in key contests in Delaware and New Hampshire and New York sent a clear message, in case anyone had missed it up until now: If you are part of the establishment, you better grab your goodies and get out of the castle while you can. [snip]

The attacks on O’Donnell were personal; she was “nuts.” The attacks on Castle were on his record; he was too liberal for some. The bitter GOP battle in Delaware for the Senate seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden was a doozy. But it was a proxy war between the Tea Party and establishment GOP writ large in this small state. [snip]

The sound and the fury in Delaware are not signs of a party in disarray — they are signs of an engaged electorate who want to make a statement. GOP voter turnout was much higher than expected. While a RINO head mounted on the wall may be a trophy, a RINO seated in a chair in the Senate could have helped make a Republican majority. But voters were unwilling to settle.

By electing O’Donnell, voters in Delaware proved the Tea Party is now more than a movement — it’s become the driving force and voice of Republican voters.

Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen know it is a revolution. And as we have stated before it is a legitimate movement worthy of respect whether you agree with the aims or not. The mocking of the Tea Party movement by Obama Dimocrats has been foolish and alienates these activists even more. That the so-called “creative class progressives” cannot muster a movement with this much energy and accomplishment is what riles them into a frenzy of mockery and hate against the Tea Party. Rasmussen and Schoen explain the significance of the Tea Party movement:

“The Tea Party movement has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in recent American political history.

It is as popular as both the Democratic and Republican parties. It is potentially strong enough to elect senators, governors and congressmen. It may even be strong enough to elect the next president of the United States — time will tell.

But the Tea Party movement has been one of the most derided and minimized and, frankly, most disrespected movements in American history. Yet, despite being systematically ignored, belittled, marginalized, and ostracized by political, academic, and media elites, the Tea Party movement has grown stronger and stronger.

The extraordinary turnout on April 15, 2010, at rallies across the country speaks volumes to the strength, power, and influence of the Tea Party movement, with more than 750 protests held across the country, demonstrating a level of activism and enthusiasm that is both unprecedented and arguably unique in recent American political history.”

Not able to understand a genuine grass roots movement when it bites them, Obama Dimocrats mocked and sniffed in derision. The mockery was especially loud from the Democratic establishment that gifted Barack Obama the nomination of the once great Democratic Party:

“In an April 15, 2009, interview, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “This initiative is funded by the high end — we call it Astroturf, it’s not really a grass-roots movement. It’s Astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”

When the elite looked, their first reaction was to say: “Well if it was real (which we really don’t believe it was), it is a one-time occurrence, it is no big deal, and it is worth neither our time nor attention.”

This was evidenced in the findings of an April 2010 study conducted by the Media Research Center, which found that ABC, CBS and NBC aired 61 stories or segments on the anti-spending movement over a 12-month period, and most of that coverage is recent.

“The networks virtually refused to recognize the tea party in 2009 (19 stories), with the level of coverage increasing only after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts” in January, the report said, referring to the Republican’s win of the Senate seat long held by Edward M. Kennedy.

The first reaction from political and media elites was that these were insignificant gatherings, just small numbers of people inflated by the media.

“It’s incredibly stupid,” said former Atlantic Monthly writer Matthew Yglesias on the early Tea Party movement.

“It can be expected from the margins, but it’s troubling to see it [The Tea Party movement] embraced and validated by more mainstream entities,” said writer Stuart Whatley in a post on the Huffington Post, April 14, 2009.

Next, they said that these protests were by no means spontaneous, that the Tea Party movement was not a legitimate grass-roots movement. Rather, it was being fed and fueled by conservative talk radio and cable television.”

Obama Dimocrats are rightly upset with the Tea Party movement because it is indeed a movement. David Kuhn today makes the point we have repeatedly made in our “Mistake In ‘O8” series that Barack Obama was a product of a singular economic event, not the product of a mass movement:

“The crash of our time came two years ago today. We know the economic story well. Lehman Brothers fell. The markets went with it.

But the political story of September 15 is barely known. That it made Barack Obama’s majority. That, two years later, it explains why the Democratic majority is on life support.

Recall the Obama hyperbole of November 2008. Talk of an enduring progressive majority. New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman typified a corps of liberal analysts at the time. “We’ve had a major political realignment,” Krugman wrote. “[The] presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies — and the progressive philosophy won.” Krugman won a Nobel Prize in economics that same year. Yet even he disregarded how the economy made Obama’s mandate that day.

By March 2009, liberal analyst Ruy Teixeira wrote a report on the “New Progressive America.” It dissected the presidential electorate. How white, brown, black and educated voted. Everyone but bicycling Norwegians. Yet, as I noted then, the nearly 50-page report ignored the economy’s role. The lapse was, again, typical of the time and type.”

Obama Dimocrats want us to forget 2008. They fear the repercussions and consequences if our analysis is the correct one. And if we are right in our analysis, then indeed 2008 when Democrats ignored primary voters in order to gift Obama the nomination, was a tragic monumental Mistake of multi-generational proportions. In short, it was the the economic events of late 2008 that saved Obama, not a mass movement.

“We are now in another political time. The Democratic House could collapse in less than 50 days. Obama lost the majority long ago. And liberal analysts are running to economic explanations. Krugman has led the chorus. “It really is the economy, stupid,” he wrote this summer.

It’s an analysis that seeks to have it both ways. The economy is blamed in bad Democratic times. It’s ignored in good. This cognitive dissonance deceived Democrats most. It brought hubris when they were on top. It now brings denial. If Obama first won his mandate on progressivism and now lost it with the economy, then the “professional left” does not have to consider where its ideas went wrong.

Democrats 2008 victory was credited to a great politician, a great campaign and a greatly changing nation. Yet it was the economy that made Obama’s majority. Not necessarily his victory. But it’s in majorities that presidents claim mandates.[snip]

‘Many forget, after all, where McCain stood before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Gallup measured McCain ahead for 9 straight days until September 15. After that day, McCain never again led Obama. Obama had only won a majority once before September 15th. And that was at the peak of his convention bounce. After the stock market first crashed, Obama surpassed or met that 50-percent threshold 33 times.'[snip]

‘By the Gallup Poll’s tracking, Democrats were winning about 55 percent of the Hispanic vote before the first stock market crash. McCain was winning the college graduate vote. By September’s close, Democrats were winning roughly 65 percent of the Hispanic vote and college graduates.

Obama won nine states Bush took in 2004. But in six of those states, including Florida and Ohio, John McCain was ahead or tied prior to the first stock market crash on September 15. Nearly to the day of the dive, Obama rose in all nine states to soon sustain a national majority for the first time.”

It was not a mass movement but an economic crisis and a Big Media manufactured mass delusion that elected Barack Obama. It was an illusion:

“Perhaps Democratic leaders bought into the thesis of Teixeira and Krugman et al. Perhaps they ignored the fragility of Obama’s mandate. Disregarded Americans’ long tension with government. Believed Obama changed the electorate. September 15 reminds us that this was an illusion. And the whirlwind of this illusion is coming in November.“

The Revolution started by the grassroots (which includes Independents and even some Democrats) to take back the Republican Party is on the march. Democrats who want the Party of FDR resurrected and who deplore the Cult of Personality of the OD Party better sharpen the pitchforks. “We have got to get it together.” The Revolution is here.

Of those, Scott Brown, Rubio, Christie, and McDonnell were well qualified — you can throw Joe Miller, Kelly Ayotte, and Nikki Haley in the mix too — and all except Rubio were so-called “establishment” candidates with the exception of Rubio, who very quickly won the backing of the dreaded establishment.

There is no comparison between these people and Christine O’Donnell, who has a well documented record of being a dishonest political hack. Just sayin’.

Defiant One, Revolutions are messy. Charlatans and lunatics are mixed in with the prophets and visionaries. As creatures of the Center/Left, O’Donnell feels culturally alien to us, as many other Republicans do. But her victory is significant. Sharon Angle is the one O’Donnell is most compared to and we were assured that Angle was a sure loser. In this year we’re not sure of too many Republicans that are sure losers.

The wave might be so big that a lot of flotsam and debris will be brought to shore. We’re watching Paladino in New York to see what he does in the next few days. If he spends money and goes after public pensions and takes advantage of the Mosque of Doom issue, even New York might be swamped by the wave. As of today we would say that is impossible and that no Republicans will win in New York. But then we look at the coast and we see that wave.

In an election for Ohio Governor today, 09/14/10, former 12th District Republican Congressman John Kasich defeats incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland 52% to 40% to retake the Ohio statehouse, according to this SurveyUSA poll conducted exclusively for WCMH-TV Columbus.

Kasich has a narrow advantage in Columbus, Cleveland and southeastern Ohio, a material advantage in Toledo, Dayton, and Cincinnati. Those with a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement vote 17:1 Republican. Whites back Kasich 3:2; blacks back Strickland 5:2. 1 in 10 Republicans cross over to vote Democratic; 18% of Democrats cross over to vote Republican. Independents break 5:3 Republican. Gun owners break 2:1 Republican. Strickland, elected in 2006, is seeking a 2nd term.

In the race for Ohio’s open US Senate seat, Republican Rob Portman today edges Democrat Lee Fisher 49% to 40%. Among men, Portman leads by 22 points; among women, Fisher leads by 3 — a 25 point gender gap. Among whites, Portman leads 5:4; among blacks, Fisher leads 3:1. Twice as many Democrats cross party lines as do Republicans; Independents split. Portman, a former US Trade Representative and former federal budget director, is significantly ahead in the Cincinnati, Toledo, and Dayton areas; voters elsewhere split. Incumbent Republican George Voinovich is not seeking a 3rd term.

Former US Senator Republican Mike DeWine today edges incumbent Attorney General Democrat Richard Cordray, 47% to 40%. Men account for DeWine’s entire advantage. Democrats are twice as likely to vote for DeWine as Republicans are to vote for Cordray. Cordray, first elected in 2008, is seeking his first full term in office.

Republican candidate Marco Rubio has opened a clear lead in a Florida Senate race, becoming the latest Tea Party favorite to benefit from voter anger at Washington, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found on Wednesday.

Tea Party-backed candidates have ousted Republican establishment politicians in Nevada, Colorado, Kentucky and Connecticut. Crist fled the Republican Party earlier this year to run as an independent when it seemed clear he would lose to the conservative Rubio in the state’s primary vote.[snip]

The poll numbers show a big swing since mid-August, when an Ipsos Public Affairs poll showed Crist leading Rubio by 33 percent to 29 percent if Meek were the Democratic candidate.

Florida is one of a dozen toss-up Senate contests across the United States that could decide the balance of power in the November and the fate of Obama’s legislative agenda.[snip]

Florida, like other states, has a large “enthusiasm gap” with Republicans far more motivated to vote in November than Democrats. The poll said 82 percent of Republicans said they are certain to vote, compared to 61 percent of Democrats.[snip]

The race to replace Crist as governor is close, with Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Alex Sink statistically tied, Scott with 47 percent and Sink with 45 percent, the poll found.

DefiantOne, what you seem to fail to understand is that for many people, their vote for ODonnell had little or nothing to do with ODonnell, or even with strategy to win that seat this time around. It was a flexing of the muscle of the power of the people. It was a message to the establishment.

Whether or not you agree, many felt that sending that message was important for the long-term health of their own R party and this country. Again, you may disagree, but that doesn’t mean that those who voted for her are crazy. It was a logical choice in view of their goal, which isn’t just winning one seat, but changing the way politics is conducted in this country.

I am seeing both democrats and republicans referring to their existing parties in power as “Versailles”. There is a huge “us against them” wave growing in this country, that is bigger than any “R against D” narrow construct. I have seen died-in-the-wool conservatives saying on blogs that they hope the sane Democrats get their party back as well. Not because they think we’ll agree with them on much (they know we won’t), but so that the power elites of either partywill no longer call the shots, and HONEST debate can once more be had among genuine citizens of differing views who love and believe in this country.

Myself, I’d like to see that as well. I want THE PEOPLE to have some respect and a voice again in this country. Not this group, or that group, but THE PEOPLE as individuals, with all of our varying approaches and views. I’m sick of rank and file R’s being drowned out by the “we know best” poobahs of their party, and of the same happening to us Dems (or former Dems).

I want REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT again, with all of OUR voices represented,even those voices I disagree with. I am tired of both parties herding us like sheep, and shoehorning us into boxes. Does that make me a tea partier? I’m not sure. But I damn well am not a party loyalist to ANY party anymore. I am an individual. I am an American first. I am not a collectivist, and I don’t think that even things that I support ought to be shoved down the throat of the public against their will.

It’s no good to say that you believe in govt of, by, and for the people *except when the people are, in your opinion, completely wrong*. If they are wrong, then persuade and convince them. But don’t bully them and override them and tell them to STFU because they are stupid and don’t understand complicated politics and policy. That is a lesson that BOTH parties need to learn, and I am glad for a movement that seems bent on teaching them that lesson.

I am also concerned that the Tea Party cannot manage to find reasonable, principled candidates who fit their mold, and by their proclivity for nominating shady characters who are a few bricks short of a full load and opposing perfectly fine candidates like Ayotte in NH and Tarkanian in Nevada. Castle may have been too far left for them, but they have no excuse for nominating Angle over Lowden and Tark. Was there not one qualified, non-batty conservative in the entire state?
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I guess I have a little different take on the matter. I do not look at the tea party as a political PARTY. If I did then I would agree with your comments.

Instead, I see the tea party as a powerful political MOVEMENT. At one level, it seeks to restore the norms of the old republic where the people are sovereign and the constitution is an eternal verity. At a deeper level it reflects the instinct for survival in an era of mega political change. The message to the elites is this: don’t fuck with Hoppie.

The Harvard trained elites have in their infinite wisdom managed to squander the economic advantage which the US had at the end of world war II. Our dollar has been split seven times since 1965. As a nation we are in trouble, but the elites are doing just fine thank you. The world may be their oyster but it is not ours. Obama epitomizes all that is wrong. The jobs are overseas and our economy is in shambles thanks to the policy choices they made.

But it is not entirely their fault either. The computer has produced megapolitical change here and across the world. My eye doctor just returned from Borneo where he went to study the great apes. He mentioned that the baboons have the same genetics as humans except for one chromosome. Too bad for the baboons. He went into the interior to help people with their eye problems and found that everyone has a cellphone. Dr. Livingston I presume? No but I can reach him on my cell phone.

In this country those economic forces have eliminated millions of blue collar pink collar and white collar jobs. Housing values have plummeted, debt has risen and the future looks bleak. At the same time we have lost control of our borders. And we now have a president who is a shill for the banks, a bon vivante with has no empathy for the people of this country. Literally speaking he fiddles while Rome burns. The big media elites fiddle right along with him.

Tea parties are a grass roots reaction to the loss of our country, our security and our political rights by people who want to do something about it. The republican establishment was all in favor of tea parties when they simply opposed Obama, but now that they are taking on the republican establishment as well they panic. They conspire with Obama to take down candidates their own party faithful voted for. What they should have done is stay calm. If nature runs its course, they will change the tea parties and the tea parties will change the Republican party for the better. It will become what it once was and no longer is–a voice for millions of ordinary people, as opposed to an elite cabal.

What happens to the Democratic party however is less certain. There is no grass roots movement within that party to push back against Obama except in isolated pockets like here. Democrats have become docile sheep whom Obama will lead them to a slaughter, and they will say fine it was for a worthy cause. Their very complacency coupled with a fear of the racist charge has turned them into little more than a charnel house and a fountainhead of anti Americanism.

If the parties as they exist today do not change then they will fracture–both of them and permanently. In that case, the political interests may well regroup along economic lines. One possible configuration could be a conservative party, an entitlement party, and an international party run by the elites. In the end, economic realities, and how each party responds to them will become the determining factor.

wbb
He went into the interior to help people with their eye problems and found that everyone has a cellphone. Dr. Livingston I presume? No but I can reach him on my cell phone.
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Too funny, really.

You made a statement about the Dem party with only pockets of resistance to the fraud right now. I agree, however I, and many like me, join the Tea party because there is not something comparable for the Dems. I believe 10-20 percent of the Tea party is ex Dems. I agree it is weird sometimes to listen to some of the speech’s or the pamphlets they pass out, but it is all we have right now.
Still when I speak out against the fraud to dems in Austin, they look at me with scorn and as if I am an Appalachian incest victim. Detoxing from koolaid is worse than heroin.I actually lost a job opportunity because of it. It was hilarious really and I shrugged it off, but these drinkers have no intention of detoxing.

I don’t know much about O’Donnell, but I listened to her today for about ten minutes and she actually sounded articulate. I wonder how much of this is the same stuff Palin had to endure. I won’t say Hillary as we know they have spread the lies relentlessly for years.

MINNEAPOLIS – Former President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that the Republican Party is embracing “ideology over evidence” and pushing out pragmatic voices that would make even his White House successor seem like a liberal.
Clinton, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Minneapolis, said there was no mistaking that Republicans have tacked hard right and questioned whether former President George W. Bush would fit in among the party’s candidates this year.
“A lot of their candidates today, they make him look like a liberal,” Clinton told an enthusiastic crowd at a downtown hotel as he campaigned for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton.
Clinton pointed to the tea party movement’s influence on the GOP.
“The Boston Tea Party was protesting abuse of power. This is now trading public power for the abuse of private power,” Clinton said, just as a tea party-backed candidate was declared the winner Tuesday night in Delaware’s hotly contested Republican primary for U.S. Senate
The former president was in Minnesota to support Dayton, the Democratic nominee for Minnesota governor. Organizers of the event sought campaign donations of between $100 and $1,000.
Dayton faces Republican state Rep. Tom Emmer and Independence Party nominee Tom Horner.
A Democrat hasn’t been elected governor in Minnesota for 24 years.
In a statement before the event, Minnesota GOP Chairman Tony Sutton mocked the Clinton-Dayton pairing, noting Clinton as president famously declared “the era of big government is over.”
“But former Senator Mark Dayton has spent his entire 30-year political career calling for more government, higher taxes and more of the status quo,” Sutton said.

democrat1,
I agree Paladino could take NYS if he pushes back against the GZM, calls for tax-cuts and stresses fighting state corruption.

BTW, for those following the rauf slumlord issue, turns out he may have crossed the IRS by claiming tax exempt status for his wife’s upper west side apartment, saying it was a place of worship which hosted hundreds of congregants.

One small problem – the partment is a 1 bedroom

From the NY post on 9/2

The leader of the Ground Zero mosque got hugely valuable tax-exempt status for a Muslim organization he founded after claiming as many as 500 of its members prayed daily in a small, one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment also listed as his wife’s residence, The Post has learned.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sought “church status” — an official IRS term for a house of worship of any religion — for the American Sufi Muslim Association, or ASMA, in 1998. The feds granted the request.

“Church status” is more than just an exemption — it means never having to pay taxes, file returns or reveal the sources of a congregation’s money or how it’s spent, according to the Washington-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, which discovered the group’s startling claims on the IRS form it filed seeking the special status.
HOLY UNUSUAL: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was granted church-exempt status on a one-bedroom in this West 85th Street building.
Reuters
HOLY UNUSUAL: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was granted church-exempt status on a one-bedroom in this West 85th Street building.

On that form, the organization said it held services at 201 W. 85th St.

That’s a 17-story apartment building with no public space big enough to accommodate the 450 to 500 worshippers the group claimed regularly showed up five times a day to pray

what?!?!?! Harry Reid calls Coons his “pet”. You know what, I was not that much of supporter of O’Donnell, but I’m now donating to her, just so Harry’s pet is free and wild, and away from any elected office.

I just sent this to my DE relatives, this may be enought to convince them to vote against Coons aka Harry Reid’s “pet” and for O’Donnell.

I hope this O’Donnell woman wins just so Harry Reid’s pet isn’t stepping a foot in the Senate.

Still when I speak out against the fraud to dems in Austin, they look at me with scorn and as if I am an Appalachian incest victim. Detoxing from koolaid is worse than heroin.I actually lost a job opportunity because of it. It was hilarious really and I shrugged it off, but these drinkers have no intention of detoxing.
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I generally ask them this question as a test of whether they are even rational:

You are a loyal Obama supporter. I can see that. I have one question for you:

Have you at any time for any reason had any reservations about Mr. Obama’s character, or competence/

After 34 House Democrats voted against the health care bill in March, liberal groups and their allies in the labor movement vowed to exact revenge.

The threats ranged from crippling primary election challenges to a withdrawal of support for some of the offending lawmakers. In a few cases, activists even went so far as to say they would run third-party candidates against the Democrats in November.

But five months later, the group of 34 has emerged from primary season not much worse for the wear. Every one of the 30 lawmakers who voted against the health care bill and is seeking another term won re-nomination.

The last of the group to be tested, Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch, won his primary Tuesday, dispatching former Service Employees International Union Regional Political Director Mac D’Alessandro.

Repost from last thread:
In reference to: DefiantOne
September 15th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
“some Big Pinkers, do not comprehend in regard to O’Donnel being trounced in the general? This is the same thing they did to Sarah and Hillary”

Um…comparing O’Donnell to Sarah Palin or Hillary is like comparing a county commissioner to Lincoln.
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No where in this statement was there a comparison of O’Donnell TO Hillary; it was a comparison to how Hillary and Sarah were TREATED.

There is no comparison between O’Donnell and Hillary in any way shape or form. None. Not in treatment or anything else. Hillary was backstabbed and betrayed by the fringe whackjobs. O’Donnell has been treated quite well by fringe whackjobs, because she is one.

Defiant One, Yes, but we’d be stuck with same kind of person…I’m not so sure that O’Donnell is going to lose by the amount of money she is receiving. Of coarse, they can rig the voting machines…they’ve done that before.

“It was a flexing of the muscle of the power of the people. It was a message to the establishment.”

That’s really cute and self-masturbatory and all, but a message to the establishment is not going to take control away from Obamacrats in the Senate where they will still have committee power, agenda power, and power to further destroy the country and the Democratic party due to O’Donnell’s nomination.

Jan H, Of coarse there is no comparison between Hillary’s experience, knowledge, ability and Sarah Palin’s. …..BUT. Are you going to tell me that Sarah’s doesn’t love her country as much as Hillary does??
Are you going to tell me that she hasn’t the huevos that Hillary has because Sarah is taking on big blogger boyz and I might add and she beating them.
Sarah and her family have been pretty badly used by their own party…she is hitting where it hurts…I wonder what Rove is saying to Palin today..LOL!

Sarah is a baby in the world of politics and Hillary is a Queen, there is no comparison.

defiantone, you can call it “cute and self-masturbatory” if you want, but your condescension and contempt for those average voters is just dripping, and offensive. As I said, feel free to disagree with that strategy, but do them the courtesy of acknowledging that they have one: To break the hold of the DC elites on their party as a long term goal.

“It was a flexing of the muscle of the power of the people. It was a message to the establishment.”

That’s really cute and self-masturbatory and all, but a message to the establishment is not going to take control away from Obamacrats in the Senate where they will still have committee power, agenda power, and power to further destroy the country and the Democratic party due to O’Donnell’s nomination.

A vote for candidates who can win will
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There is a movie going on here. You cannot judge a movie by a single snapshot.

My condescension is for people who like to suspend disbelief and ignore simple facts and enable Obamcrats to stroke their own political egos. Yes, I know nothing but contempt for the people who are going to be responsible for allowing Reid to retain control of the Senate, and they fully deserve it.

My contempt is not for average voters, but for fringe voters. The average man is not going to support O’Donnell, as her fringe supporters will find out in 1.5 months.

There strategy is very poorly executed, simply because they have rejected a guy who voted against Obamacare and guaranteed a win for Harry Reid’s pet.

The truth may be snooty and sneering, but it’s still the truth. They made a mistake, sorry if they don’t like hearing it. PUMAs are not in the business of stroking egos.

There will be mistakes made along the way–by both sides. But the economic reality will drive the momentum. The two political parties are a duopoly. They control the system. They reward the elites. And the system no longer works for average Americans. The reason is clear: the economic interests of the elites and the middle class are no longer aligned. Globalization and technology have freed the elites from their prior reliance on the American People.

wbboei,
Globalization and technology have freed the elites from their prior reliance on the American People.
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So according to the Defiant One….Obama and his minions are celebrating tonight for Delaware. What do you think they are doing???

It all fits together. We are trying to sell my mothers house. There are 100 houses for sale within 1 square mile. The market is dead. In the entire north end of a major metropolitan area only 39 houses sold in July. I ask real estate people what will it take for the market to improve. The answer they give me is jobs. And where are the jobs? With every passing month the labor market increases and the job growth sags. Capitalists are unwilling to put capital at risk with Obama in the White House. He has created too much uncertainty in terms of taxes, regulations and social engineering. As a result big business is sitting on 3 trillion cash, small businesses are folding and the economy is frozen. No wonder people are upset.

Tea Party Win Shows Voters in a Mood for Vengeance
Democrats are trying to convince themselves the GOP is hopelessly divided, but that’s wishful thinking.

Christine O’Donnell’s win against moderate Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware is the culmination of a growing anti-establishment feeling among Republicans.

Nothing like getting outside the Beltway—even if only by driving up I-95 to Delaware. Because what I heard at a little polling place in Newark, Dela., told me, even before the day’s election results were in, exactly what to expect in November:

An earthquake.

President Obama, meanwhile, is behaving like a guy unsure of which way to run as buildings collapse around him.

Two instructive things happened yesterday, and the contrast between them was even more instructive:

* Christine O’Donnell, a perennial loser with a trainload of baggage—but also a Palin-backed Mama Grizzly riding a wave of voter disgust with the political establishment—pulled off the upset of the year so far. She beat the well-liked, but way-too-incumbent moderate Rep. Mike Castle for the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware.

* The president, meanwhile, was a few miles farther up I-95, spending his time (and the Democrats’) delivering an anodyne, utterly forgettable pep talk to schoolkids in Philadelphia about the need to study hard in school and forget about the fact that their parents might not have jobs in this lousy economy! Are you kidding me? Who was this trip designed to impress? Is anyone against working hard? Is any independent voter this fall going to vote for the Dems as a result of the president’s forthright, candid and brave stand? [snip]

In a quiet, middle-class precinct—a cross section of genteel homes near the University of Delaware, and smaller, boxier ones closer to the old auto plants—almost every Republican voter I talked to wanted to vote for O’Donnell. That in itself was remarkable, given that Castle was well known and, until the last couple of weeks, well liked.

Facing a Tea Party groundswell, Castle—widely thought of as a nice guy— launched a vicious, lavishly funded attack on O’Donnell. It persuaded some voters to turn away from her and settle for Castle. “I reluctantly voted for him,” said Louise Jones, a university administrator. “I wanted to vote for her, but I found out that there were too many questions.”

But Jones added that the Tea Party was good for the GOP and the country. “I think it’s useful to change things up, and those people aren’t crazy in the way the media has portrayed them. I agree with them that we have to worry about whether the government is taking over every facet of our lives. And I really care about fiscal responsibility. That’s what this election is going to be all about, I think.” [snip]

Democrats are busy trying to convince themselves that the GOP is hopelessly divided. I didn’t see that in Newark, Dela. Many of the O’Donnell voters were women, interestingly, and cared about party unity. I didn’t find a single Castle voter who said he or she would vote for Democrat Chris Coons if O’Donnell won.

This theme is probably wishful thinking on the part of the Dems. The GOP will be united around a few simple ideas: tax cuts, budget cuts, spending cuts, and rolling back Obama’s health-care and environmental agenda. That message seems likely to power the GOP to big gains, maybe even to control of Congress.

People are so angry and frustrated that they will lash out at the only big shots they control: not the banks, not Wall Street, not China, not the Beltway media, but elected officials.

How can Obama and Dems survive? Well, it’s OK, and necessary, to attack the likely GOP leadership’s agenda. They really do want to steer Social Security toward the private sector; they do want to let the wealthy keep all of their many tax cuts; and they really are hypocritical about earmarks and spending.[snip]

If Bill Clinton were president, I know what he would be doing: he’d have found 100 things to brag about.[snip]

Polls are self-fulfilling prophecies. Advisers who are too influenced by polls merely reinforce them. Right now the data say voters don’t like the stimulus, don’t like the health-care law, don’t understand the financial-reform measure. And so the president and the White House seem almost loath to talk about them in any gritty detail. It’s as though they are running away as fast as they can. They’d rather talk about working hard in school.

But an attack unanswered is an attack accepted, and the White House has let the GOP frame these issues. I wrote in NEWSWEEK last week that the health-care law was a loser. Well, it’s the president’s job to prove me wrong—and I think it can be done.

A classroom speech is not an answer. If Obama can’t do better, he may soon be dealing with Sen. O’Donnell from Delaware.

So according to the Defiant One….Obama and his minions are celebrating tonight for Delaware. What do you think they are doing???
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I think it is more important to focus on what we do. Go back to that article I posted last night from Red State by the former senate staffer. That article tells it how it is. There is a job ahead to clean up both parties. Castle is as much of an Obamacrat as Christ. The Republican label is just a disguise. Nothing was lost in not electing him. I never bought the idea that the Senate would fall. However, I am pretty sure the House will. But that leaves Obama with the same problem, and no fig leaf to hide behind. Frankly Connie, I do not think the Obama people have much to celebrate about. The country as a whole has turned against them, and the walls are closing in.

Conventional wisdom-meister Howard Fineman’s take:
————————————————
Admin: yes, by the time he says it, it his conventional wisdom inside the beltway. But it is not the content of his little diatribes that excites our collective consciousness. Rather, it is his unforgettable manner of delivery. That sad mournful look, that monotone voice, the punch line that never comes, and the furtive glance which seeks approval from his colleagues. He does it all with such panache that he could easily be the placebo in an ex lax blind taste test.

heck, what do you expect from this busy prez O…he has got students to talk to and then a week of parties at the white house planned…then his big staged ‘town hall’ next week with pre selected questions…

…forget working…no time for that…besides no one is listening to him anymore…over exposed and overkill…he overplayed his hand…and overreached…

Apparently its illegal to solicit illegal to solicit campaign funds on federal property amongst other things she’s done here
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It is indeed illegal. Typically they go across the street to private property make those calls. My friend and the late Jennifer Dunn used to go across the street to neural turf together on a routine basis. They would never solicit or receive campaign contributions on government property. Holmes Norton has been around politics since the 1970s. She knows better than to do this. Very embarrassing. This matter will have to be referred to the ethics committee. It is a per se violation.

wbboei,8:08
So what I hear when you say what you said…is that big business either gets the man/woman or demo/repub in the WH or we all starve to death…is that what you are saying because that’s how I see it.

It really pisses me off too, but I want Obama out too…he’s cost way too many jobs. It would of been different with Hillary…Bill’s administration we had jobs galore. Obama is just bad news for everyone.

Come to Brooklyn Bowl on Thursday and join like-minded individuals for a friendly bowling match that may just solve the world’s ills.

Former president Bill Clinton is asking you to join him at the Brooklyn Bowl in New York on Thursday for a special evening of music and goodness. Young professionals and philanthropists are coming out to support the Millennium Network, a group committed to making change, improving lives and transforming the future.

You can count on Russell Simmons, Peter Sarsgaard and Chely Wright to be there, with music legend Chaka Khan serenading you from behind the mic. The car company, Friendly Ride, is offering a 10 percent discount for anyone attending the event. The password is the Clinton Foundation, so don’t forget to mention it when ordering a car.

I think youhit the nail on the head wwhen you stated it was about the people. The candidates may or may not be the most desirable, but the underlying reason they have been so successful is the people who, to quote the late Peter Finch “are mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore”.

It is not just House Rules she has violated. It is also the US Code of Federal Regulations.

There is a pattern here alright. It may or may not have existed before, but it has become open and notorious since Obama took over. I think this marks four cases with the CBC. Five if you count Ice Box Jefferson. What does that say to the country. I think it says they have no respect for the institution, the American People or their own constituents. Would I be saying this if they were white? You betcha. As always, if there is a more benign explanation, then I would like to hear it.

admin
September 15th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
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The SEIU was the Praetorian Guard for Emperor Obama. They struck powerful blows against the Germanic tribes in the west. Then when the mid terms came along, they abandoned the field. Their leader Andy Stern departed, and their treasury was depleted by his enormous excesses. I wonder whether Obama will fulfill his promise to Hoffa to lift the federal government oversight.

With the midterm elections looming and the Democrats looking to take more losses than many predicted just a few months ago, DNC chairman Tim Kaine bravely joined Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night. Stewart has been a consistently vocal critic of the Democratic Party’s political efforts and was not reluctant in sharing his criticism to the former Governor of Virginia and current party chair. The segment opens with Stewart plainly stating “you’re in trouble dude,” and gets more entertaining from there.

DefianteOne
Of those, Scott Brown, Rubio, Christie, and McDonnell were well qualified — you can throw Joe Miller, Kelly Ayotte, and Nikki Haley in the mix too — and all except Rubio were so-called “establishment” candidates with the exception of Rubio, who very quickly won the backing of the dreaded establishment.

Do you remember the attacks on these “qualified” people. This race is no different. Nikki Haley?? The “adulteress”. How soon you forget.

Kaine is a total fuck wit.
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I did not see the interview–and Europe is the less. But ever since the Virginia primary, I have had an eye on Kaine et ux. He is as you say a malevolent fuck wit. But you have not really lived until you see him get tough and threaten Democrats on behalf of Obama. What you see is a punk who is all mouth and gut wind. When it is over aids have to keep telling people despite what you saw, he means it–really. Can you imagine that bozo in the peace corps.

Rove on Gretta is talking about the dirty politics of O’Donnell who near the end of the campaign according to Karl, smeared Castle by hinting that Castle had an “interest” in some guy. Karl was pretty disgusted about it.

Oh, my. The chickens do come home to roost. Remember when Rove used the exact same tactics when he was Bush Jr.’s campaign person in his run against Ann Richards in TX for gov. Didn’t ol’ Karl do that exact same thing with rumors about gays in Ann Richard’s administration.

Now he’s calling it dirty politics but it’s just a page out of his campaign play book.

Oh, my. The chickens do come home to roost. Remember when Rove used the exact same tactics when he was Bush Jr.’s campaign person in his run against Ann Richards in TX for gov. Didn’t ol’ Karl do that exact same thing with rumors about gays in Ann Richard’s administration.
========================
He did the same thing to McCaine in the 2000 primary in South Carolina. Accused him of fathering a black girl who McCaine helped along the way. The story was total bullshit. The McCaine people told me this, so I believe it is true. They hated Rove with a passion for that reason.

Ol’ Karl was mad so he had to fall back on “comfortable” hate. He did the same thing that Hannity does at every chance he can get…he drops into that mocking scratchy voice that they love to do to imitate Bill Clinton.

Poor Karl and Hannity, they can’t help it. They are just died in the wool a-holes.

Moon–I just saw the video. Kaine looks and sounds like a used car salesmen tying to sell a lemon to a sophisticated buyer. He is not handling the objections well, his affirmative arguments are shallow and he comes across as a clutz/

Defiant One, with all due respect, Hillary was backstabbed by more than the fringe. The party establishment itself backstabbed her, and even “regular jane” voters – they weren’t all crazy bots who voted for The Fraud.

*I realize this wasn’t the point you were making in the whole of your comment.

When Bush Jr. was running the second time, remember when people in West Virginia and Arkansas got robo calls or some such saying that if the Democrat candidate was elected, he would ban the Bible. Remember how he used the church people with that “Your marriage won’t be worth the paper it is written on if you vote for a Democrat who will immediately install gay marriage.” He certainly got the good church people in a frenzy to vote for Bush Jr.

Karl is one of the down and dirty guys and nothing is too unfair and nasty for him to use in a campaign.

When he rails against the tactics of another candidate…with a straight, cherubic face…does he honestly think that we have such short memories that we don’t remember his behavior as campaign manager?

Rove has no room to call anyone dishonest…he is the epitome of dishonesty and dirty politics…I imagine he told Brazoid how to beat Hillary….I hope Rove has to go home in shame….he should be outlawed in politics…he’s a crook and enjoys being one…I hope he gets his ass cooked by the Tea Party activists.

I will say this much, Hillary was backstabbed by her own party, the voters in the democrat (I will no longer call them democratic after may 31th, 2008) party chose her, the establishment dems overrode that choice by the dem voters.

With the repubs I am noticing that they at least are respecting the will of their voters. Today on Politico, I read that Steele would not endorse anyone in the primaries and will back who the voters choose. Takes me back when Donna Brazille, Howard Dean, the chairman of the DNC, all plotted against Hillary, the repubs at least are respecting the candidate the people are choosing, even if it means a weaker candidate in the general.

wbboei,8:08
So what I hear when you say what you said…is that big business either gets the man/woman or demo/repub in the WH or we all starve to death…is that what you are saying because that’s how I see it.
————————————
The logic of their position is unassailable. The new legislation which Obama has passed is Byzantine in complexity, wired for social engineering, and deadly to their bottom line. If they put capital at risk in this environment they will lose and their shareholders will fire them. This is rocket science only to a man like Obama who has never run so much as a hot dog stand/

JanH, I am sending that video of Peres and Hillary to my sister…she studies the religion and follows their customs…she will see why I just think Hillary is the one we need now….she’s a bit skeptical because of Obama.

He did the same thing to McCaine in the 2000 primary in South Carolina. Accused him of fathering a black girl who McCaine helped along the way. The story was total bullshit. The McCaine people told me this, so I believe it is true. They hated Rove with a passion for that reason.
********
The Rove message against McCain varied. For the fundies his daughter was 1/2 AA. For the Veteran’s groups she was 1/2 Vietnamese that he fathered while at the Hanoi Hilton….special favors for McCain for his “treason”…Lee Atwater would have been very proud.

Furthermore, if those businessmen create those jobs overseas rather than here they do not have to worry about these onerous regulations. Obama who promises jobs. But then through sheer ignorance he passes a set of laws that deter job creation. What he has created is what economists call perverse incentives–and he does not even know it.

Anne Richards was a victim of a whisper campaign by Karl Rove.. He said she is a lesbian because she rides a Harley. I guess all women who ride Harleys are lesbians?? Excuse me, Karl, while I kiss the sky!!

He did the same thing to McCaine in the 2000 primary in South Carolina. Accused him of fathering a black girl who McCaine helped along the way. The story was total bullshit. The McCaine people told me this, so I believe it is true. They hated Rove with a passion for that reason.
********
The Rove message against McCain varied. For the fundies his daughter was 1/2 AA. For the Veteran’s groups she was 1/2 Vietnamese that he fathered while at the Hanoi Hilton….special favors for McCain for his “treason”…Lee Atwater would have been very proud.
———
So he gerrymandered the lie. Shades of Boss Tweed and the fine tradition of Tammany Hall. It is cocktail hour. Let us raise our glasses and drink to tradition.

One of the first was the totally-made-up “Office of the President Elect”, with their cutting-edge logo around it.

Maybe we’ll see a new, equally historic, new logo soon, “The office of the outgoing (lame duck) President”, and below it could say “Historic marker No. 345, BO historically becomes the first black president to lose his bid for a second term”

Jay Leno was being an ass but I am impressed with how Bristol handled it. In fact, I have been impressed with all of Palin’s family (not so much Palin herself but if not for the ‘lead’ role she was expected to play, she would have been adequate and more too).. Todd always seemed to say the right thing in every interview, her parents and even her sister in one interview and they don’t lose their composure.

In fact, consider this a sneak preview of O’Donnell’s campaign strategy against Coons. One strand of the tea-party ethos, i.e. purging Democrats, centrists, RINOs, etc etc, isn’t such a smart way to go in a state as blue as Delaware. But a different strand — purging the establishment — can appeal anywhere. If she and her team are smart, they won’t so much as utter the words “liberal” or “Democrat” vis-a-vis Chris Coons from now until November. Stick with “ruling class,” “rubber stamp,” “Goliath,” “Beltway favorite,” and so forth. If it works on Matthews, it can work on anyone.

Kay, saw your comment on the last thread and I too am curious about how self-correcting this American democracy is. I watched the 2000 election with interest and waited for a correction but they (people at large and parties) made a choice to accept finesse and sophistication over justice. Then 9/11 happened and everything was turned on its head and unbelievably Bush got elected again. Obama is part of that same continuum with the party establishment gaining even more ground with a complicit media. What happened in 2008 was a travesty of justice and they even got half the people voting for that charlatan! Now people are realizing that both parties are pulling the wool over their eyes. I wonder how this will all turn out.

Michelle Obama thinks being America’s First Lady is ‘hell’, Carla Bruni reveals today in a wildly indiscreet new book.

Miss Bruni reveals that Mrs Obama replied when asked about her position as the U.S. president’s wife: ‘Don’t ask! It’s hell. I can’t stand it!’

Details of the private conversation, which took place at the White House during an official visit by Nicolas Sarkozy last March, emerged in Carla And The Ambitious, a book written in collaboration with Miss Bruni.

“Nicolas (Sarkozy’s) bling-bling and Carla’s tumultuous former (love) life don’t make the Sarkozy couple very good company in the Obamas’ eyes”, according to the book, which claims that the US first couple had long tried to steer clear of their French counterparts.

SHV, it may have to get ugly for the wiser ones to get involved. Like admin said up thread, charlatans and lunatics make their way in the heat of the confusion to be rescued by the prophets and the visionaries.

{I was of course referring to 2008 primary in my last comment — that was the real election.}

Wow!! Double wow!! Who on this forum will defend the people issuing the fatwa? Who? If they do, shame on them. I am so angry.

(via Althouse)

[O]n the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is… moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity… in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

I consider myself a PUMA. I currently use a mountain lion as my avatar on Hillbuzz as a representation of that. Yet, if PUMAs are predominately like you, then those PUMAs can go *blank* themselves, too. PUMAs rightfully looked for sympathy and support when Hillary was being trashed in a sexist way, and I for one believe that the same forces are at work trashing Christine O’Donnell, regardless of if I agree with her 100% or not on the issues. There were Republicans that were horrified at the treatment that Hillary was getting. You and your PUMA friends don’t own the opposition to Obama. You are just one segment of that opposition, and condescension will only lose support for your cause. Nobody needs to hear that bs, especially from a self-identified PUMA who should be sensitive to nasty behavior. I am beginning to see a trend with some of the more liberal posters here with regards to how they view those who disagree with them. You’re only as smart as you think you are.

Written by investigative journalist Besma Lahouri, it describes Mrs Obama as “the only one in (Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy’s) eyes able to dispute the title of the planet’s sexiest and most glamorous first lady”
————————————————————————–
Say what? Which planet are we talking about? Oh Venus. Now there is a sunny paradise well suited for Michelle, i.e.

“Venus is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all the terrestrial planets in our solar system, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide. Venus has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor does it seem to have any organic life to absorb it in biomass. A younger Venus is believed to have possessed Earth-like oceans,[8] but these evaporated as the temperature rose, leaving a dusty dry desertscape with many slab-like rocks. The water has most likely dissociated, and, because of the lack of a planetary magnetic field, the hydrogen has been swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind.[9] The atmospheric pressure at the planet’s surface is 92 times that of the Earth”.

On such a planet Michelle could scowl and play I hate whitey tapes to her hearts content. She might not be particularly sexy to whatever else lived there but she could be edible.

That’s very insightful. I’ve had the gut feeling that this is more anti-establishment than anti-party for quite some time. Both parties have segments that want to clean house, but the Republican party is effectively doing so while most of the Democrats party members seem to be DOA with regards to throwing the bums out. I am hoping that obama’s low polling is an indication that rebellion will begin to be more visible in the Democratic party soon. This blog is a great place to lead any Democrat friends that you have if you believe that they are open to hearing things about fixing the Democratic party, although I am starting to believe that the party may never be suitably fixed.

SHV
September 15th, 2010 at 11:55 pm
I wonder how this will all turn out
********
It will be ugly, wrapped in the American flag and carrying a cross.
————
You have been reading the mind of Chris Hedges.

Max Eternity – Why does it seem that no matter what President Obama does, Democrats refuse to admonish him?

There are exceptions to the rule, like filmmaker Michael Moore who has ramped up his criticism of one of Obama’s specific policies, war and occupation. And in the press Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman have consistently reported about Obama’s almost complete embrace of “The Bush Doctrine.” Yet by and large it seems that those on the Left–Liberals and most claiming to be Progressives–are very much unwilling to criticize Barack Obama.

The image above shows a woman in a European store selecting a candy box with President Obama’s image on it. If a picture is really worth a thousand words, it would seem that this single image illustrates the true nature of what a few on the Left are coming to see as Obama’s celebrity packaging of junk food political policies of corporate welfare and endless war–much like his predecessor Bush.

Journalist Chris Hedges writes of this, the Left’s ongoing pattern of tacit complicity in Obama’s duplicity, at TruthDig.com in a piece entitled “Liberals Are Useless.” It reads in part:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

This was the first known use by Palestinian terrorists of phosphorus whose use against civilians is banned by international law against civilians.Phosphorus shells cause severe burning and set off fires.

Hamas has cranked up its attacks since Israeli and Palestinian leaders began talking at Sharm el-Sheikh under the aegis of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday.
None of the participants mentioned Hamas’ escalating war on Israel and the IDF reprisal was understated, a belated Air Force strike against empty tunnels in southern Gaza.
debkafile reported earlier:
Tuesday and Wednesday morning, three missiles, almost certainly Iranian-made Grades, were fired from Gaza at the two Israeli port cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod, and another missile and nine mortar rounds by noon Wednesday – 7 against Eshkol region farms and two at Kibbutz Nirim. This was the most extensive Palestinian assault from Gaza since Israel’s Cast Lead operation early last year.
debkafile’s military sources report that at least three explosions were heard across the port-towns of Ashkelon and Ashdod, sending people scurrying to the nearest bomb shelters, although the “Red Color” alert was not switched on – apparently to fit the official government line, which is not to rock the diplomatic boat. In fact, the army spokesman tried insisting at first that only one rocket had been fired and only hours later did teams arrive to investigate the blasts.

Tuesday morning as Israeli, Palestinian and US leaders sat down to talk at Sharm el-Sheikh, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenades were fired from Gaza at an Israeli unit patrolling the border fence running past Kibbutz Alumim’s farmlands. They missed. Israeli tank guns returned the fire, hitting the assailants, one of whom was killed and four wounded.
According to Egyptian sources, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to continue talking to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas without pause even amid Palestinian terrorist attacks. He reportedly made this pledge when he met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm el-Sheikh during the opening round of talks.

Hamas seems to have taken this as the go-ahead for more attacks without fear of Israeli retaliation. However, a fresh menace – and a challenge to Netanyahu’s pledge – has raised its head. The same Tuesday, IDF Col. Nitzan Nuriel, head of the counter-terror center, revealed that both Hizballah and Hamas have recently acquired from Iran unmanned aerial vehicles, missiles with a range of 300 kilometers and an array of weapons more advanced than those found in most European arsenals.
The Israeli officer warned that international terrorist organizations worldwide had established strong ties with Palestinian terrorists based on the West Bank and inside pre-1967 Israel. The military and intelligence assistance rendered Hizballah and Hamas by Iran and Syria, he said, had raised their operational capabilities to a level on a par with regular armies.

SHV, it may have to get ugly for the wiser ones to get involved. Like admin said up thread, charlatans and lunatics make their way in the heat of the confusion to be rescued by the prophets and the visionaries.
*********
That seems to have been the traditional pattern. American Communist Party, The “Emma Goldmans”, KKK, American Bund, John Burch, etc., etc., all were corrected by the US Constitution and a diverse media and political system. Well Bush/Cheney and now Obama have really stressed the Constitution, the politicians are now playing for the same team and the media has been consolidated and essentially are the organs of the Administration and the mega corps. With the economy being restructured to the detriment of 80% of the American people, I am afraid that religious fundamentalism will be seen to provide answers rather than an FDR type political pragmatism.

one of Obama’s specific policies, war and occupation. And in the press Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman have consistently reported about Obama’s almost complete embrace of “The Bush Doctrine.”

=================

On a slight tangent. Someone might defend Obama for not improving on Bush’s Iraq withdrawal schedule. They might say it was an agreement made between the US and Iraq and not subject to change, or Bush had left such a mess that it coulnd’t be cleaned up any faster, etc.

But what’s really bad is, Obama CLAIMING CREDIT for it, concealing that it was actuallyl Bush’s schedule — as though Obama had invented it and it was a good thing.

admin
September 15th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Defiant One, Revolutions are messy. Charlatans and lunatics are mixed in with the prophets and visionaries. As creatures of the Center/Left, O’Donnell feels culturally alien to us, as many other Republicans do.

Although I agree with the part of this statement concerning charlatans and lunatics, I think that the idea that people who are centrists, or center left, feel that conservatives are culturally alien to Democrats as a whole is mostly not the case. With all of life’s every day interactions, most, if not all of us, have regular contact with people who harbor a wide spectrum of political thought. I don’t find those who think different than me with regards to politics as culturally alien. I understand many of the reasons why they hold their beliefs, even if I don’t agree with them. I also know that many people vacillate between voting Democrat or Republican, and many split their tickets. That is not an indication of alienation, but a sign of a certain political savy, plus a sign of the lack of ideological thinking that allows for a more independent thought process.

I’ve rethought the new Dem logo, it was so easy to take the piss out of, and oh DU is having a major shit fit over there about it, calling for Kaines head.

CHANGE IN TATTERS
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That is good moon. I like this one too: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”—”the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing”.

Notice how much importance Kaine attached to the change of a logo. For them, it has ceased to be a matter of public service. It is all about marketing to the public and rewarding wealthy interests. Blame Felix Rohatyn for that. He is the one who let the Wall Street boys take over the party, and repudiated the tradition of Roosevelt. He is busy these days probating Kennedy’s will. He is also a friend of Pelosi. Bill did not want him for the reasons discussed.

the media has been consolidated and essentially are the organs of the Administration and the mega corps.

=====================

I have a hard time believing that such media bias is anything NEW. Hearst Castle wasn’t built by Clark Kent. What David Brinkley was accused of semaphoring with his eyebrows, is now the stuff of numberless blogs.

I keep suspecting that now with many sources, we’re just beginning to find out about things that the media of the 50s and 60s never hinted at.

With the economy being restructured to the detriment of 80% of the American people, I am afraid that religious fundamentalism will be seen to provide answers rather than an FDR type political pragmatism
————————————————
It’s not unlikely. And the worse things get, the more likely it becomes. In that case, the human desire for moral clarity and self assurance will assert itself. And religion will provide answers they cannot find elsewhere. This is why atheists in foxholes sometimes find god.

Here is the reality. There is a religious group in this world that gets EASILY offended by everything anyone says of their religion and are willing to KILL people for it. What is wrong with this picture?

I don’t know how we can instill tolerance in those people, instill perhaps a bit of sense of humor, a bit of self-deprecation, a bit of maturity, a bit of self-introspection, and a bit of magnanimity. They have a long way to go. This much I know — their reformation is not going to come through appeasement or political correctness or even silently accepting whatever they do (to their own and others). Say there are critical thinkers like Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there was another woman I forget her name (her video is in a post I wrote for NQ), but they all need protection. What if there were hundreds of them? Will they all get FATWA and get killed? If ever we need a jourNOlist type of list to amplify the message, this will be it. How about a secret society of reformers in great numbers. They can’t kill them all, can they?

A couple weeks ago, House Member Eleanor Holmes Norton made a fundraising call to a lobbyist. The lobbyist wasn’t available, so Holmes Norton left a voicemail.

We have been given a copy of that message. The audio is below.

By way of background, with their prospects for November quickly deteriorating, Congressional Democrats are scrambling to assemble the financial resources they hope can stave off their electoral armageddon. Speaker Pelosi and her leadership team are putting a lot of pressure on Democrat members to pony up campaign contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the article linked above, Politico noted:

In August, Pelosi and other top leaders wrote members, saying, “We need to know your commitment is to maintaining a strong Democratic majority now” and pleading with them to call “to let us know what you are able to do and when.”
The pressure is especially strong on members from “safe” districts, who need little campaign money of their own to win reelection. The catch, though, is that many of these members haven’t amassed vast campaign war-chests, for the simple reason that they haven’t needed them. So, they are scrambling to meet their Pelosi-imposed obligations. Holmes Norton is from one such “safe” district–the District of Columbia.

In the following voicemail recording, Holmes Norton seeks a campaign contribution from the lobbyist and even mentions that she hadn’t previously asked for a donation. Such is the pressure Speaker Pelosi has placed on the members. But, it is the content of Holmes Norton’s message that is interesting. (Note: the first few seconds of the recording, where the name of the lobbyist is said by Holmes Norton, have been redacted by the source.)

Her message raises many concerns.

1. At the very beginning of the message, Holmes Norton notes that the lobbyist:
ha[s] given to other colleagues of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Beyond being a bit heavy-handed, where did she get this information? Such donations are listed in FEC reports, but it is a violation to use that information to solicit campaign donations.

2. More serious, however, is her frequent mention of her seniority and her Chairmanship of a subcommittee. She is attempting to solicit funds based on her past actions taken in her official capacity in Congress. She is implying to the lobbyist that, should he decline to donate, he will be turning down a senior member of Congress who Chairs a subcommittee highly relevant to his “sector”.

3. Worse than that, she details her role overseeing a large economic development project in the District, funded by “stimulus” funds. It would appear that either the lobbyist has an interest in this project, or the Congresswoman thinks he does, as she states she is “frankly surprised” the lobbyist hasn’t given to her. Especially, she notes, because of her
long and deep work …in fact it has been by major work on the committee and subcommittee it’s been essentially in your sector
“In your sector.” This raises additional concerns, and we note potentially relevant laws here:
She who promises, directly or indirectly, any government contract or other government benefit (provided for or made possible by any Act of Congress) as a reward for a political contribution shall be guilty of a misdemeanor (18 U.S.C. § 600).
She who attempts to cause anyone to make a political contribution by denying or threatening to deny any government payment or other government benefit (provided for or made possible, in whole or in part, by any Act of Congress) shall be guilty of a misdemeanor (18 U.S.C. § 601).

Then there are the House Ethics rules, according to House Ethics Manual (2008 Edition):
p. 147: “[N]o solicitation of a campaign or political contribution may be linked to an action taken or to be taken by a Member … in his or her official capacity. … The Standards Committee has long advised Members … that they should always exercise caution to avoid even the appearance that solicitations of campaign contributions are connected in any way with an action taken or to be taken in their official capacity. … [A] Member should not sponsor or participate in any solicitation that offers donors any special access to the Member in the Member’s official capacity.”

p. 150: “[A] Member may not accept any contribution that is linked with an action that the Member has taken or is being asked to take. A corollary of these rules is that Members … are not to take or withhold any official action on the basis of the campaign contributions or support of the involved individuals …. Members … are likewise prohibited from threatening punitive action on the basis of such considerations.”

4. We don’t know from where she made this call, but it is a relevant inquiry. It is, after all, illegal to solicit campaign funds on federal property.

As Holmes Norton repeatedly notes on the call, she is a senior member of Congress. She knows or should know all of this. First elected to Congress in 1990, she took her law degree from Yale University and clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Leon Higginbotham before working as an assistant legal director at the ACLU, law professor at NYU, Chairman of the NYC Human Rights Commission, and Chairman of the EEOC. She is a tenured law professor at Georgetown University and serves on the boards of three Fortune 500 companies.

That a Member like Holmes Norton would leave the foregoing voicemail message must be a testament to the kind of pressure Speaker Pelosi has put on her members. Indeed, she acknowledges this in the call:
As the senior member of the um, committee and a sub-committee chair, we have (chuckles) obligations to raise, uh funds. And, I think it must have been me who hasn’t, frankly, uh, done my homework to ask for a contribution earlier. So I’m trying to make up for it by asking for one now, when we particularly, uh, need, uh contributions, particularly those of us who have the seniority and chairmanships and are in a position to raise the funds.

Note: Beginning this morning, we made several attempts throughout the day to contact Holmes Norton’s office. At least two email requests for comments were sent to the Congresswoman’s Communications Director. Three phones calls and messages were also left. None of these were returned. We made clear we were on deadline, but we held the story for almost an entire day to give Holmes Norton’s office a chance to respond. If we receive a response from her office, we will update the post.
Below is the full transcript of the call:

This is, uh, Eleanor Norton, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Uh, I noticed that you have given to uh, other colleagues on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. I am a, um, Senior Member, a twenty year veteran and am Chair of the Sub-committee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management. I’m handling the largest economic development project in the United States now, the Homeland Security Compound of three buildings being built on the uh, old St. Elizabeth’s hospital site in the District of Columbia along with uh, fifteen other, uh, sites here for, that are part of the stimulus .

I was, frankly, uh, uh, surprised to see that we don’t have a record, so far as I can tell, of your having given to me despite my uh, long and deep uh, work. In fact, it’s been my major work, uh, on the committee and sub-committee it’s been essentially in your sector.

I am, I’m simply candidly calling to ask for a contribution. As the senior member of the um, committee and a sub-committee chair, we have (chuckles) obligations to raise, uh funds. And, I think it must have been me who hasn’t, frankly, uh, done my homework to ask for a contribution earlier. So I’m trying to make up for it by asking for one now, when we particularly, uh, need, uh contributions, particularly those of us who have the seniority and chairmanships and are in a position to raise the funds.

This headline brought to mind one of MO’s backhanded statements aimed at Hillary during the Primary. It went something like: “Hillary knowing how to keep a clean house and if she didn’t know how, she shouldn’t be there.”. woo-hoo!

The WH aides hired by the Obama administration for WH jobs need to fill out a detailed application and questionaire. Did they check the “Y” box saying all their Federal Taxes were paid up to date?

It is the responsiblity of the WH to know everythig there is to know about the character of their WH hirelings. Especially, their IRS status to the government as their employer and therefore as their extended WH family.

(New IRS regs mandate in every Real Estate transaction the home buyer’s purchase be cleared first with the IRS for a residential mortgage certifying no back taxes are due and owing. Otherwise the buyer is disqualified for a mortgage. (The WP is becoming a huge source for due digligence reporting!)
______________________________________

Obama White House aides owe the IRS $831,000 in back taxes — and they’re not alone

Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don’t labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.

Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.

They’re correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it’s always seemed to those Americans who don’t feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don’t labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.

Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.

They’re correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it’s always seemed to those Americans who don’t feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class …

… Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along — unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

The Post’s T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works.

(And just gave themselves $4,500- $5,000 raises.)

Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president’s top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G’s here or there. So he dropped out.

And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he’d be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury. The fine fellow who’s supposed to know about handling everyone else’s money. In the end this was excused by Washington’s bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.

And under Geithner’s expert guidance the U.S. economy has been, well, wow! Just look at it.

Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents’ names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama’s very own White House owe the government they’re allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.

In the House of Representatives, 421 people owe a total $6,524,892. In the Senate, 217 owe $2,774,836.

In the IRS’ parent department, Treasury, 1,204 owe $7,670,814. At the Labor Department, where Secretary Hilda Solis’ husband had some back-tax problems before her confirmation, 463 owe $7,481,463. Eighty-one workers for the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors owe $1,076,733.

Over at the Justice Department, which is so busy enforcing other laws and suing Arizona, 1,971 employees still owe $14,350,152 in overdue taxes.

Then, we come to the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who preferred to call terrorist acts “man-caused disasters.” Homeland Security is keeping all of us safe by ensuring that a brave Dutch tourist is aboard every inbound international flight to thwart any would-be bomber with explosives in his underpants.

Within that department, there reside 4,856 people who owe the tax agency a whopping total of $37,012,174.

Obama’s IRS is driving my poor 87 y.o. father nuts….they’ve made him re-do all his taxes from 2006 to now…we had to hire an accountant to figure it all out and he really only owed a few hundred dollars…after my mom died, he just couldn’t figure out how to do it. We just finished turning in the 2006 taxes….its not like my dad makes a ton of money or has much left in the stock market. The man lives on a little of 20,000. a year, but Obama’s IRS thought they should drive him nuts. The bastards! He almost had a heart attack worrying about it.

Now I know where all the construction work is being done, thanks to Breitbart because it sure ain’t in Texas. Here we are re-doing roads that were just re-done the year before. I kid you not and this road work is always making freaking late for work.

I’ve been out, just got back, very tired. I want to respond to something you said a day or two ago; forgive me if I word it clumsily.

Different people value different kinds of evidence. There’s objective evidence, and there’s ‘anecdotal’. Imo the best sort of discussion includes both kinds.

This is an anonymous forum for good reason. Some of us may be willing to give our real names and real world credentials, but most do not. So — anyone can post “I’ve lived in X for Y years and so I know absolutely that Z always everywhere.” Maybe the poster is telling the truth, maybe not. Maybe they’ve got all the facts, maybe not. Maybe their judgement is sound, maybe not. The reader has no way of knowing.

I’ve never bothered to post (which is true) that I’ve lived and worked with people of the Middle East and Indian subcontinent and Thailand for many decades, both in their own countries and with those living in the US, being involved in cultural and religious outreach programs they set up here.*

I prefer to post objective evidence, which anyone can check: ie cites. Not taking the cite author’s opinion at face value of course, but looking at the coverage (or lack of) itself as evidence. (For example, when coverage of the trooper that Palin tried to get fired mentions the divorce in 1,000 stories and the taser in 200 [not real numbers, I’m too tired to look them up], that’s evidence that the media is biased against Palin. When a search of recent articles on the Turkey election doesn’t find any mentioning adultery, that’s evidence that the practice is not exactly in immediate danger (though it may have been in 2004 😉

No one has a complete and objective, absolutely true, view of anything. Neighbors or even siblings with the same education living in the same town all their lives may have different views of what is going on: for example whether the US is being taken over by the Religious Right or by the Secular Humanists.

So please don’t be offended when I fail to take your personal conclusion as the final total truth on something, just because it’s YOU saying so.

From Márcio A. V. Carvalho [State University of Campinas – Brazil] we have been getting information that the images that were aired by CNN were images SHOT BACK IN 1991!!! Those are images of Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait! . CNN has not responded to our request for clarification, so we do not know who has been telling the truth.

Pop and Politics host Farai Chideya interviews Florida Tea Party candidate Colonel Allen West about his views on race, anger among voters, and why he believes he can win in Congressional District 22 in Florida.
h t t p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XKp__d9jI

Quote from video: “Politics in America has almost become a feudal system.”
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I’m sending this candidate a donation.

Mosque Imam sued as a slumlord. Union City, NJ has filed suit against the Mosque hustler on behalf of tenants plagued by rats and bed bugs. I guess the tenants are all Islamophobes.

http://www.metro.us/newyork/local/article/635313–imam-sued-as-bad-landlord
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They must be. And money hungry to boot. It is the sign of the times. They never called Ghandi or Mandela slumlords when they tried to bring peace and understanding to the world. His defense will be I never INTENDED for the rats and bed bugs to enter the premises. I have an explicit clause in the lease agreement prohibiting subtenancy. And if that excuse, I mean defense, fails to convince the jury, and the Islamophobe counter charge does not prevail, then he can always borrow a chapter or two from the book of the man who inherited every problem he has, is making giant strides to solve them but never promised anyone it would be easy, and just say when nobody was looking whitey done it just ask Michelle Queen of Venus (as herein described) unless she hates her job, the one she hustled for, so much that she will not respond. And by the way what part of her job does she hate most? Let me take a wild guess. Probably making nice to all those white people–who could blame her for that. Or having to do the slow burn while Reggie makes gaga eyes at Barack. A first lady’s job is not an easy one.

“Institutional racism is gone.”
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Not in the DNC under Kaine. Not at CNN. And not in the Obama household. It is simply directed against white people. But they refuse to play victim. Those uppity whites.

I see where Ritz Carlton the glitziest hotel chain on the planet (earth not venus) is offering loyalty discounts. Just think of the deal which they must be giving lady bountiful when she travels to Spain or sails down the Seine sipping champagne from a glass slipper marked paid for by US taxpayers on the bottom, thus reviving the old myth of the ugly American. Her defense. I am not an American, I am a citizen of the world and the world is my oyster. But even if I am an American I am married to a man who believes he is a Lulu tribesman so there. Someone needs to tell her that Jacques Cousteau refused to eat oysters. He called them the garbage men of the sea. But mo abhors the restless sea and prefers blue Mediterranean waters and matching sapphire earrings. As the head of the Teamsters in Alaska during the pipeline days used to say: what good is power if you do not abuse it, as he slammed his gold nugget cuff links on the table. Put differently, Mrs. Obama does not live by bread alone.

confloyd
September 16th, 2010 at 12:53 am
This is total crap.
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Hamas uses phosphorus shells in stepped-up assault on Israel
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Just more of what has been going on for what seems like forever. Has there been any world outcry out there yet? Nope, didn’t think so.

The NY Post is obviously racist too. Court documents yesterday revealed the Taxpayer is paying for police to watch his buildings because they are deadly firetraps. Gee the courts must also in on bringing this man down on the eve of an election. After all he is just a victim of the media………..sarc.

While the imam behind the planned mosque near Ground Zero was jetting around the globe touting his project, a pair of dilapidated apartment buildings he owns in New Jersey fell into such disrepair that cops have to stand watch in the event of a fire.

The fire watch, at taxpayer expense, was revealed during a court hearing yesterday where Union City lawyers asked to have two buildings owned by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf placed into receivership so that rents could be used to fix dozens of violations, including inoperable alarms and sprinklers.

Judge Thomas Olivieri gave Rauf’s attorney, Tomas Espinosa, until Sept. 23 to produce evidence of Rauf’s efforts to address all of the violations or lose control of the buildings.

the media has been consolidated and essentially are the organs of the Administration and the mega corps.

=====================

I have a hard time believing that such media bias is anything NEW. Hearst Castle wasn’t built by Clark Kent. What David Brinkley was accused of semaphoring with his eyebrows, is now the stuff of numberless blogs.

I keep suspecting that now with many sources, we’re just beginning to find out about things that the media of the 50s and 60s never hinted at

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Media bias is not new. But what we see today is more intense and propagandistic than before. The editors no longer do their jobs which is to separate the false from the true. They have become marketeers. It is like Greshams Law wherein the bad money drives out the good. And every pundit wants to be a celebrity. When GE takes over media outlets like NBC, has knockdown drag out fights with the news desk over what will be shown, and installs the productivity standards of a widget factory the reporting no longer resembles the truth. See Winning, by Jack Welch.

There are persistent rumors that Gibbs is on the way out. The White House press corp is beside themselves. Say it aint so Joe. What we are hearing is that Barack and Mo have decided that they need a press secretary who can do a better job of showcasing their lifestyle. And there is a reason for this. Powerful interests call him a dog. But if they could be convinced that he is really a Saudi Prince they might back off. At least that is the thought process. So word has it that they plan to bring in the late Robin Leach narrator of The Lives of The Rich and Famous, to mesmerize the White House press corps, now that Helen Thomas is gone. She would never have stood for it, but the current crop of apple polishers will swallow pretty much anything they dish out as long as it has Obama’s name on it. Contrary to popular opinion, they have not changed. You still get the same softball questions. No Murrows, just Ann Comptons with her mawkish ways.

Seventy-one percent (71%) of Delaware Republicans now support O’Donnell after the party’s divisive primary, while Coons picks up 84% of the state’s Democratic voters. Voters not affiliated with either major party prefer O’Donnell by eight points.

Now last poll, she lost independents by a lot, thats a swing to her, now if she can get the indies up more and all the republicans behind her then she can actually do this.

Mosque Imam Is a Bully. Not just with the tenants, but with his position that he does not give a sXit about the 9/11 survivors. The people in the Federal government, who owe taxes, are Bullies also. They are saying make me, and obviously we don’t. The IRS in turn bullies Americans they think they can get away doing it to. The Political parties are Bullies also. The American Voter is being bullied into believing what their party says is true. As bullies usually do, they use FEAR.

However, it does look like those being bullied have had enough. It is obvious that we would rather have bad legislative representatives, than those who run for office, gain our support, and then do exactly what their political parties tell them to, ignoring the people who put them in office. I cannot say that there is much difference, but they want us to think there is.

Admin- Finally we see the fruition of the brilliant strategy by the master at work.
Our Bill must be so proud of himself. And of course, he deserves the Nobel Prize for what he’s accomplished. I think this time around, he will be nominated and recognized because the Global Elites approve of his actions. They’re losing money with this loser in the WH… It’s business to them. Their safety net was the Tax extension. They always win. They do not suffer as do ordinary citizens.

BC’s strategy of breaking the backbone of the Republican Party (who are they to go unscathed?) and steering the voting public to his popular Democratic endorsements must be so gratifying to him in his overall grand scheme. Now, many will realize the indispensable role played by Sarah Palin. She became the potent velvet hammer before our eyes put in place by none other than the master strategist of all time. Just as my previous article stated airport scanners are looking for metal and coins… In 08′ we were looking for Bill at the helm of Hillary’s campaign… He was no where to be found because Hillary’s staff convinced her the campaign was strictly about the rise of women in a man’s world all the way up to the top. That error will never happen again… Lesson learned.

A “Civil War’ in the Republican Party is what USA Today, another elite media voice calls it. The certain harbinger of a resurgence by Obama, a sweep of the electoral map from coast to coast, and get back to the Mount Rushmore.

The wrong diagnosis. It is dictated by pure partisanship not truth. This is not a civil war. It is a revolt against a party establishment that has lost touch with the base. There is a big difference. The base believes in the constitution, individual rights and small government. The leadership believes in talking the talk but refuses to walk the walk. Crist, Castle or Quisling, they are all the same. Their values are negotiable. The only thing they believe in earnestly is lining their own pockets, pursuing power and ignoring the will of their constituents in the name of a greater good which they alone discern/

A “Civil War’ in the Republican Party is what USA Today, another elite media voice calls it.
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Last evening, Couric claimed similar Repub problems. Had Schieffer and someone else in on the coverage. Spent substantial time on this aspect … and nothing else as I recall.

The fascinating thing about the Hanson article is that it carries the implicit insight that under this administration and its anticolonial ‘progressive’ dispensation the US is following the political structural path of almost all African post-colonial societies. A captive peasant population ruled by a corrupted bureaucracy and a self-interested elite interested only in power and wealth

Kay
September 16th, 2010 at 9:54 am
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Kay, ever since you posted that article I have been thinking about it. It illuminates one of the dark regions of his psyche, namely his palpable hatred for America. I could not understand the sentiment since he led a charmed life and was given every possible advantage. He was too young to have been influenced by the civil rights movement, and frankly has shown no great commitment to it that I can see. For lack of a better explanation, I assumed that his anti American bias was based on resentment toward his mother, and the sweet little nothings that Franklin Marshall Davis, a known communist and worse, may have whispered in his ear at a tender age. But that was merely speculation. But I was looking in the wrong direction. I now believe that it is a very credible hypothesis that the reason he hates this country is because he sees it through the mythical eyes of a father he never knew but nevertheless worshipped in absentia. And looking at the world circa 1960, colonialism had passed into history, but neo colonialism was alive and well, and countries like Kenya were as economically dependent on Britain as they ever were. The vestiges of colonialism are perhaps the source of his pervasive animus, and the reason why he seeks to end all pretense of American exceptionalism.

Kay, I like this line in your comment: “A captive peasant population ruled by a corrupted bureaucracy and a self-interested elite interested only in power and wealth.”

The thing is I had been enamored with the American sophisticated political process, how the indies in the middle change the dynamic again and again with the two dominant parties. So I always gave the electorate more due than it probably deserved and attributed more sophistication to them than necessary. Now is the time for the ‘captive peasant population’ to rise up to my expectations and show how sophisticated they really are. I am waiting.

I think the globalization and rising competition from other parts of the world is driving the corrupt politicians and the elites to fear and hang on it whatever is left of the promise of wealth and power, even at the cost of screwing their own country and their own people. These are testing times for the American electorate. In this context, Plain like characters seem smarter and shrewder than ever. Who will fill the void, indeed?

If anyone deserves a Nobel Peace Prize it is both Bill and Hillary Clinton. If anyone deserves their Nobel Peace Prize stripped away from them, its obama for false representation. If anyone deserves to be fired it is the Nobel Committee who committed this travesty in the first place.

U.S. first lady Michelle Obama reportedly finds life in the White House barely sufferable.

“Don’t ask! It’s hell. I can’t stand it!” Michelle Obama is said to have told French first lady Carla Bruni during a private conversation at the White House during an official visit by French President Nicolas Sarkozy last March.

That’s some of the the dish served by Bruni, in her new tell-all book. In “Carla and the Ambitious,” which the U.K. Daily Mail newspaper reviewed for Thursday editions, Bruni quotes the first lady’s lament, among many other revealing episodes with global leaders and French paparazzi.

Bruni, a singer and former model, apparently collaborated on the book with writers Yves Derai and Michael Darmon as a push-back to an unauthorized biography of the wildly untraditional political spouse that was released Wednesday. Bruni’s book is due out on Friday.

White House sources say there is increased talk that senior President Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod will exit his post after the mid-term elections, and be replaced by his campaign colleague and business partner David Plouffe.

Plouffe has been holding down the fort at the two’s firm, AKPD Message and Media, and the thinking inside the White House is that Axelrod both needs a break and to begin focusing on 2012 re-election planning.

Meanwhile, Obama, say White House insiders, would like to see if Plouffe’s presence can “shake things up” with a staff that is said to be demoralized. “I remember what it was it like in the last days of Jimmy Carter,” says a longtime Democrat operative. “On certain days, this team rivals that feeling. These kids have no context for what they are going through.”

Plouffe was Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, but chose to stay in the private sector instead of taking a senior White House position. After the special-election victory of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, Plouffe upped his role as an outside senior adviser to the President.

Plouffe did stay involved politically with Obama, but did so by working with Organizing for America, the political grassroots organization that evolved from the Obama presidential campaign. But OFA has failed to live up to the expectations the White House and the Democrat National Committee set for the group 20 months ago.”

Kay
September 16th, 2010 at 10:10 am
The fascinating thing about the Hanson article is that it carries the implicit insight that under this administration and its anticolonial ‘progressive’ dispensation the US is following the political structural path of almost all African post-colonial societies. A captive peasant population ruled by a corrupted bureaucracy and a self-interested elite interested only in power and wealth

It is usually a reversion back to the pre colonial system that kills these societies. When they manage to retain the good and throw out the bad (think of India) they progress. So many romanticize these pre colonial societies and forget about the slavery, mass executions, unbelievable poverty, etc. It is the noble savage syndrome and they see themselves as the benevolent ruler. I think Obama sees himself this way at times.

I reckon a few of our media and pundits would keel over if this ever happened in the US.

……………………………………………….

Sweden’s Left Party has defended its decision to book a stripping performer for one of its open meetings last weekend.

The burlesque dancer, who performs as Miss Cookie, stripped down to her knickers and stickers bearing the socialist, feminist party’s logo over her nipples at the ‘Rock the arse off the right’ event in Järna near Stockholm, The Local reports.

Despite some attendees reportedly leaving in protest, Södertälje councillor Staffan Norberg said: “As burlesque and circus and cabaret, which I think it was marketed as, I think it is okay.

“If you don’t like burlesque and lack a sense of humour and satire, then this was not the right place to be.”

He suggested that the theme of the performance was the stripping away of the superficiality of the right wing to reveal only the left and added: “I thought that there was a political message. But broadly, naturally.”

Miss Cookie added to Dagens Nyheter: “I think that a woman has the right to use her body for humour. There was also a man in the show who stripped down to reveal a naked upper-body and was thus more naked than I, but no-one is upset about that.”

If you want to know what a man is all about; you look to the women in his life. Thus the sentiment by many psychologists. I read this analysis long ago and believed what was written was an accurate description of the Obama psyche. I never forgot it. (The refreshment of this article has many updated opinions.) Obama knew who his father was- and what he was. He just never spent very much time with him. The shaping of Obama’s personality or as we see it, personality disorder, came from his mother and her associations with his step-father. I’ve posted this before but find it is worth reposting for the reread to stay on track. To the reader, this analysis becomes more a glaring representation of Obama as the days turn into months then into years, as we watch the ingrained self-destructive mechanism that is Obama begin to show itself to the world.
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Obama’s women reveal his secret

Page 1 of 2

By Spengler

“Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.”

(at the link there is a video of her statement)

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama’s face are not new to the candidate’s wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of “blackness” at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”

Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama’s campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. “I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive,” she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

“For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, “She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.” Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

“Frustration” and “disappointment” have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama’s choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother’s milk.

Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. “She was kind of a dreamer, his mother,” Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. “She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don’t pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don’t in this country.” How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair in pursuit of a political agenda.

“Naivete” is a euphemism for Ann Dunham’s motivation. Friends describe her as a “fellow traveler”, that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero’s student visa was revoked in 1967 – the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.

Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967, Indonesia’s military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.

Dunham’s experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds”. In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke into popular awareness with Margaret Mead’s long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly repressive West. Mead’s work was one of the founding documents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American universities.

In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took matters a step further. Peru’s brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham’s radicalism was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of international organizations.

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America’s success made it a magnet for the world’s savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion’s Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm – “Great Awakenings” – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and con-men.

Be afraid – be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.</

The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. (I think we’ve seen a change in relations with Russia lately. Now that the Bush proposed missile shield has been scraped.)Americans question the premise of America’s standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America’s standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.

“Evil will oft evil mars”, J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama’s father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals – and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell. (I think time has provided the answer to the Global elites and they are in the process of shifting gears midstream and turning to the Clintons to proceed to righting the ship of the United States for the good of the World.) Thank you, Jesus!

Talking about Muslims being ‘overly sensitive’. Here are the ‘cartoons’ they were reacting to. Cartoons that really were offensive — but never existed, invented by people who wanted to cause trouble.

A habit of fact-checking would have been helpful. :-/

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/09/20/100920taco_talk_wright#ixzz0zhxzcFti
A group of radical imams in Denmark, led by Ahmed Abu Laban, an associate of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist organization, decided to use the cartoons to inflate their own importance. They showed the cartoons to various Muslim leaders in other countries, and included three illustrations that had not appeared in the Danish papers. One was a photograph of a man supposedly wearing a prayer cap and a pig mask, and imitating the Prophet. (He turned out to be a contestant in a French hog-calling competition). Another depicted a dog mounting a Muslim in prayer. The third was a drawing of the Prophet as a maddened pedophile gripping helpless children like dolls in either hand. The imams later claimed that these illustrations had been e-mailed to them as threats—although they never produced any proof that they hadn’t made the drawings themselves—and so were fair representations of European anti-Muslim sentiment. The leaders saw them and were inflamed. The Sunni scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi demanded a Day of Rage.

Conventional wisdom has it that out of control spending is THE problem. Cure that and it will be all beer and skiddles. Watch the Republicans and conservatives and soon Obama himself all high five each other, before they sit down and kill each other over whose holy cow programs to cut–as in whose ox will be gored. Let me see if I can get a small voice in edgewise and say this. I hope you succeed and we will be behind you all the way– pushing. And if you do succeed against all odds then we will give you a medal for climbing K-2. And then we will tell you to move on and climb Mount Everest because that is what it will ultimately take for you to succeed. As SHV said last night the ultimate problem here is the economy is being restructured in a way that will be detrimental to 80% of the American Public. That is the legacy of Obama and Bush before him. So go ahead and fix the first problem. But austerity alone is not the answer. Plus you will never get it because you do not have the guts. But assuming I am wrong, you must then solve the second problem. If you fail to solve the second problem, then the American People will hold you and the rest of the elites fully accountable for our pain.

Kay–the NRO article you posted is also excellent. In my view there will always be elites. But those we now have, seem to have little or no respect for the American People. They behave like yuppies–uber materialistic and in search of some pet cause to give their lives meaning. They flunk the test enumerated by Carnage in his Gospel of Wealth, which said that with wealth comes responsibility to use it wisely and not for vanity. It is kind of like Barack and Michelle. They get to the top, they indulge and rub everyone else’s nose in it. Not a good thing for the country. If we must have elites, let us at least be sure they are responsible ones.

There was other good news, too, in the recent past. Christine O’Donnell said that she led in the polls against her Democratic opponent up until the Republican party started attacking her. If that was the case then, then it is possible that she will regain that poll advantage if those who once supported her, return to her column. If she gains more Republican support, and increases her lead in independent voters, there’s a good chance that she can eke out that victory, especially if one considers the enthusiasm gap where Republicans, and those against the Øbama regime are much more apt to cast ballots in November. Christine has the time to either make or break her candidacy. Let’s hope she makes it!

Elites are all about business and the bottom line. Social consciousness is not a yardstick by which they base their lives. If you have never been an entrepreneur it will be harder to understand.

However, Bill Clinton is about to change all that with his Global Initiative. The elites will be “trained” to respect that their money was made in a way that will benefit and help mankind. Creating a better world for all.

The Clintons will give the Global elites a respectability they have never had before… Bill will make them into heroes like the forgotten Carnegie, that who knows may have been Bill Clinton’s initial inspiration.

The elites will be “trained” to respect that their money was made in a way that will benefit and help mankind.
**********
That was a common “world view” of immigrant and 1st gen Jews in America, esp. German Jews of the 19th-early-mid 20th Century. “Spend the first 1/2 of life accumulating wealth and the 2nd half giving it away.”

Exactly- and when you think about it, billionaires are reluctant to donate their money into building public institutions anymore because they did not realize the economy they created out of (politically driven) greed created the economic volatility and the country’s instability we are now stuck with-.

WASHINGTON — The White House is denying that first lady Michelle Obama ever described her White House life as “hell.” Mrs. Obama’s spokeswoman, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, responded Thursday to a purported comment attributed to Mrs. Obama in a forthcoming book, “Carla and the Ambitious,” about French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. The book says Bruni-Sarkozy recalled that during a recent White House visit with her husband, the French president, she asked Mrs. Obama about her new role. According to the book, Mrs. Obama replied: “It’s hell. I can’t stand it.”

…………………………

So the WH is calling the French first lady a liar, i think i know who i’d believe. It also fits into my theory that neither of them want a second term, it goes right back to the primaries when she said “this was a one time thing, we are not doing it again”

Are you an American expatriate living in Turkey? Or are you a foreign national posting here? I had wondered about that in the past. I realize that non-US citizens comment on some of the blogs I visit, but they are mostly from English speaking countries like Australia, Canada, or Great Britain.

Dinesh D’Souza has drawn a torrent of criticism with a Forbes cover story that accuses President Obama of adopting “the cause of anti-colonialism” from his Kenyan father.

But while most detractors focus on the author–and Newt Gingrich, who embraced the critique–the White House is aiming its ammunition at the business magazine.

“It’s a stunning thing, to see a publication you would see in a dentist’s office, so lacking in truth and fact,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says in an interview. “I think it represents a new low.”

Gibbs is meeting with Thursday afternoon with Forbes’s Washington bureau chief, Brian Wingfield, to discuss his objections. “Did they not fact-check this
at all, or did they fact-check it and just willfully ignore it?” he asks.

The magazine would not make Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000, available for comment, or any other editor. The biweekly did issue a statement: “Dinesh D’Souza’s cover story was presented as an analysis of how the president thinks. No facts are in contention. Forbes stands by the story.”

But some facts are very much in contention, and D’Souza–who loosely based the article on his forthcoming book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”–isn’t hesitant to discuss his work.

Reached separately in New York, D’Souza, 49, who worked in the Reagan White House, says his argument that the president was heavily influenced by the late Barack Obama Sr. is a “psychological theory.” But, he insists, “the idea that Obama has roots that are foreign is not an allegation, it’s a statement of fact.”

The facts are also these: Obama Sr. abandoned the family when his son was 2, and the future president saw his father only one more time, during a visit in Hawaii when he was 10. Obama Sr. died in 1982.

Gibbs says the Forbes attack comes at a time when there is “no limit to innuendo” against the president, including baseless charges that he is a Muslim and was not born in the United States. Forbes, he says, “left the facts on the cutting-room floor.”

D’Souza acknowledges one error. He wrote that Obama “is a man who spent his formative years–the first 17 years of his life–off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.” Obama visited Pakistan once, as a college student, when he was older than 17. (Hawaii, of course, may be off the American mainland, but it is hardly out of the American mainstream.)

When Gingrich called the article profound and said Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” world view, Gibbs accused the former House speaker of “trying to appeal to the fringe.” Gingrich told the Daily Caller that his own remarks “seemed to touch some kind of irrational nerve on the left.”

The Forbes piece begins by calling Obama “the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history.” D’Souza then uses long, winding threads in an attempt to tie Obama’s policies to his upbringing. “He took his father’s dream, his vision, his ideology,” D’Souza says in the interview.

While describing Obama Sr. as a polygamist and drunk driver who has been accused of wife-beating, the author says that the president “adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder…. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West…Clearly the anti-colonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. ….. The invisible father provides the inspiration.”

Robert Gibbs called the publication of the story “stunning.”As one example, D’Souza writes that the Export-Import Bank, “with Obama’s backing,” last year offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil to explore for oil that he says would remain in Brazil (though presumably it could be exported). Gibbs notes that the bank had no Obama appointees at the time and that the president’s nominee to run the bank was awaiting Senate confirmation. D’Souza calls this a “semantic game,” saying the president had the authority to stop the financing.

D’Souza, who has been affiliated with conservative think tanks, has written more than a dozen books, including “The End of Racism,” “Illiberal Education” and “Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.”

In the interview, D’Souza says he explicitly rejects the notion that Obama was born anywhere but Hawaii and calls suggestions that he is race-baiting “preposterous.” As someone who spent his first 17 years in India, he says he feels “an eerie similarity to my own background” in examining a president who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. “I’m completely Americanized–I have an American accent, an American wife–but a residue of me is foreign.”

D’Souza says his thinking about Obama’s influences draws heavily from the president’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” But that book describes a young man’s struggle to understand his African roots and the father he never really knew, and offers a largely critical portrait of the Harvard-educated man who left his family.

Nobama, I am american, i tend to work abroad a lot in my line of work. I could’nt care less if people are looking at what i write, the censorship here is quite bad but frankly I’m not going to let someone shut me up. If it means i have to leave here, then so be it, i’ll just move, i’m my own boss.

turndownobama
September 16th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Talking about Muslims being ‘overly sensitive’. Here are the ‘cartoons’ they were reacting to. Cartoons that really were offensive — but never existed, invented by people who wanted to cause trouble.

A habit of fact-checking would have been helpful. :-/

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/09/20/100920taco_talk_wright#ixzz0zhxzcFti
A group of radical imams in Denmark, led by Ahmed Abu Laban, an associate of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist organization, decided to use the cartoons to inflate their own importance. They showed the cartoons to various Muslim leaders in other countries, and included three illustrations that had not appeared in the Danish papers. One was a photograph of a man supposedly wearing a prayer cap and a pig mask, and imitating the Prophet. (He turned out to be a contestant in a French hog-calling competition). Another depicted a dog mounting a Muslim in prayer. The third was a drawing of the Prophet as a maddened pedophile gripping helpless children like dolls in either hand. The imams later claimed that these illustrations had been e-mailed to them as threats—although they never produced any proof that they hadn’t made the drawings themselves—and so were fair representations of European anti-Muslim sentiment. The leaders saw them and were inflamed. The Sunni scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi demanded a Day of Rage.

turndownobama,

Are you saying that because these cartoons were indeed offensive that it was right for the Muslims to riot?

Oh, BTW, I got a very enthusiastic cell phone call last night from the DLCC, because of course they can count on my help and volunteerism as they have in years past! What do you want to sign up for this election season? She was soooooo cheery! The lady was even aware of how hard I’d worked for Hillary, and was sure she had a faithful worker on the line.

You could have heard a pin drop when I coolly and calmly unloaded on her about how the band of Chicago thugs had destroyed the party I loved, trampled on faithful rank-and-file Democrats, and I had no intention of working, donating, or even voting for a single Democrat in 2008.

I ended with “the current Democratic Party will NEVER get my vote again. Never. You want my vote and my activism? Bring back the party I knew, and get rid of these snake oil salesmen. Until then I’ll vote any way I have to to see every last one of them destroyed.”

She stuttered something about “Um…I think I’m having a phone line issue, so I have to go….” and hung up.

turndown, being offended by the offensive is not “being overly sensitive”. Rioting and burning and threats of violence IS.

And no, other religious groups do not do that. When artists present “art” that consists of pissing on Christ and denigrating Mary, Christians are outraged. They are OFFENDED. There is nothing wrong with being offended by the deliberate profaning of your sacred symbols, whatever your religion. And the christians protest, and they boycott, and they loudly complain. They do not, however, start turning over cars and issuing death threats from the pulpit.

If you can’t see that there is a HUGE difference there, then you have a big issue with reality, and a double standard that is mind boggling in its scope.

Interesting. Have you lived there long? I am not sure if I would want to live in an Islamic dominated country. Scratch that… I am certain that I would not want to do so. Anyway, I assume there is a benefit in some way for you to do so. I hope that you remain safe there.

I was wondering if there are every day Turks who actually admire America. Do you know of any? Are the Turks friendly towards Americans?

Dinesh D’Souza has drawn a torrent of criticism with a Forbes cover story that accuses President Obama of adopting “the cause of anti-colonialism” from his Kenyan father.

But while most detractors focus on the author–and Newt Gingrich, who embraced the critique–the White House is aiming its ammunition at the business magazine.

“It’s a stunning thing, to see a publication you would see in a dentist’s office, so lacking in truth and fact,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says in an interview. “I think it represents a new low.”
&&&&&&&&

Gee, how many doctors’ and dentists’ offices were cluttered with “well respected” magazines in 2008 who were lacking in truth and fact when they did everything in their power to elevate Obama past Hillary, and Obama past McCain, so that these same talking head authors could then make wads of money writing about the Historical President they just helped install into office????

The Obamacare bill was never fully completed, with lots of “fill in the X’s”. Only now does that ugliness seem to carry repercussions. Here’s an in depth article from a couple of days ago:

reason.com/archives/2010/09/14/rogue-states

Rogue States
The revolt against ObamaCare
==================

Peter Suderman from the October 2010 issue

At the tail end of December 2009, as negotiations on the final Senate version of the health care overhaul were being completed, David Paterson, the Democratic governor of New York, held a joint press conference with independent New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in which they declared their unified opposition to ObamaCare. The legislation, they warned, would cost the state $1 billion, threaten the continued operation of many hospitals and nursing homes, and force the city to close 100 clinics. Bloomberg told the New York Daily News the law was “a disgrace.” A bitter Paterson groused that he felt like his state was being “punished.”

State politicians from the GOP were no less upset. A few days earlier, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, president of the Republican Governors Association, had chided the Senate for “poor policy” and warned that the bill’s unfunded mandates “would necessarily cause states to raise taxes or cut vital services like education and law enforcement.”

Three months later, the fiscal punishment that both Paterson and Barbour feared was signed into law. Thanks to the unexpected election of GOP upstart Scott Brown to Teddy Kennedy’s old seat in the Senate, which left Democrats for the first time during the Obama administration without a filibuster-proof majority in the upper body—and thus without the ability to pass a revised version of the bill—the House chose to swallow hard and pass the Senate legislation unchanged, making only limited modifications in a follow-up reconciliation bill.

Much of the language that passed into law was never intended to be final; it was more like beta software. Most of the important elements the authors had intended to include were there, but not always in the final intended form. And the code was still crawling with bugs, particularly on the level of implementation: at the states.

But Democrats had heard the call of history. Passing any bill—even a creaky, obviously flawed beta version—was better, party leaders decided, than declaring defeat so tantalizingly close to the finish line. And so, on March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama stepped up to a White House podium to memorialize the signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

As he did, Vice President Joe Biden leaned over and whispered, near a still-hot microphone, “This is a big fucking deal.” As with all the best political gaffes, Biden’s slip of the tongue revealed the truth. ObamaCare dramatically increases state Medicaid burdens at a time when local budgets are in deep crisis, asks states to participate in a woefully underfunded bridge insurance program, and pushes state governments to set up complex health care “exchanges” that must be designed and run according to the administration’s standards—standards it has yet to define and can change at whim. The law is a big deal in every way, and the first institutions to absorb the shock are state governments. That’s why so many have already begun to resist.

Risky Business

In the middle of 2009, as congressional Democrats began to dig in on ObamaCare, they ran into a cost problem—or, more precisely, a political problem caused by estimated costs. Early drafts of the legislation had racked up Congressional Budget Office scores well north of $1 trillion, and the unheard-of price tag provoked an immediate backlash. By September, President Obama was promising the legislation would come in at “around $900 billion.”

In order to meet that promise, the law’s authors loaded the bill with budgeting gimmicks that made its first-decade top-line cost appear lower. (See “The Lie of Fiscal Responsibility,” June 2010.) One of those gimmicks was to delay the bulk of the law’s new benefits—and thus the bulk of its spending—until 2014. That meant the CBO’s traditional 10-year score, which covered 2010–19, accounted for only six years of spending.

It also meant that three and a half years would pass before the new, broad-based insurance subsidies kicked in and key new regulations took effect. That three-and-a-half-year gap translates into a three-and-a-half-year political nightmare for members of Congress intent on proving that the law is bringing immediate benefits to their constituents. Legislators therefore told states to immediately establish a network of new high-risk pools—state-run insurance options for those who might otherwise have trouble getting insurance due to various risk factors. Invariably, these pools will be populated by the least healthy, and thus the most expensive to insure. Yet ObamaCare also requires these pools to charge standard market rates, meaning they will require significant public subsidies. And the law provides just $5 billion in such funding.

In June, Richard Foster, Medicare’s chief actuary, told The New York Times that the $5 billion will run dry as early as 2011. An estimate from the union-funded National Institute for Health Care Reform projects that as many as 7 million individuals will qualify for the new plan. According to a report from the Center for Studying Health Care Change, a non-partisan health care organization that conducts original health care research, there is enough funding to cover only about 200,000 of those people, or less than 3 percent. As a result, the center concluded, the program “could leave hundreds of thousands of potential participants with serious medical problems unable to obtain coverage.”

ObamaCare leaves states on the hook for the rest of the tab. On a conference call in early May, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reportedly tried to reassure state officials that they wouldn’t be stuck with the bill. But the HHS has yet to say where the extra money will come from. Against this grim backdrop, 21 states have refused to operate the new insurance pools, leaving their setup and operation to the federal government instead.

In part, states are balking at the idea of being micromanaged by the feds, telling Washington to do the job itself if it can’t butt out of the process. In the words of Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a nonprofit health care research organization that advocates free-market solutions, “You basically have the states running something in which the federal government is telling them what to run.” The rebellion is also a reaction to the complexity and difficulty of the job. As William A. Hazel Jr., Virginia’s secretary of health and human resources, told The Washington Post in May, building a high-risk pool is “an enormously complicated undertaking.”

But to judge from the letters state officials have sent to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the biggest complaint is cost. In one letter, Georgia State Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine wrote, “I am concerned that the high risk pool program will ultimately become the financial responsibility of Georgians in the form of an unfunded mandate.” Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell wrote that his state would not participate because the money allocated to fund the program in his state would be used up in just 22 months.

With its high-risk “bridge” pools, Obama-Care has indeed created a bridge—to nowhere.

Washington’s Way

The administration’s bridge program may be rickety and unfinished, but it’s only a temporary concern. Eventually 2014 will roll around, and by that point the high-risk pools will no longer be the focus, because states will have been pushed to design and erect exchanges—complex health insurance marketplaces through which individuals can purchase subsidized coverage.

In the fight over ObamaCare, Democrats failed to pass an explicitly government-run insurance option. But with the exchanges, they’ve done the next best thing by creating what is effectively a network of herding pens for insurers. Rather than run the insurance plans directly, states will corral all of their insurance providers into a government-run, highly regulated marketplace, telling plan providers what to do and how to do it.

But insurers won’t be the only ones subject to government marching orders. Although the exchanges will be operated at the state level, state governments won’t really be in charge. Starting in 2014, HHS will have the authority to determine, via regulations that govern the exchanges, the minimum health insurance requirements for most medical services and providers as well as cost-sharing details.

With greater power comes greater bureaucracy. According to a June report in The Washington Post, HHS will have to hire hundreds of additional staffers to shoulder its new responsibilities. The department needs brainpower as well as manpower: As it stands, the administration doesn’t have the necessary expertise to carry out its new duties. Edmund Haislmaier, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, points out that HHS “doesn’t know how to do any of this. The federal government doesn’t have any experience running insurance regulations.” Prior to the passage of ObamaCare, that job was left largely to the states, who were given the freedom to regulate—or not—at their discretion. But no more. Essentially, explains the Galen Institute’s Turner, the law forces states to become contractors to the federal government. “States will not be able to do it their way,” she says. “They’ll have to do it Washington’s way.”

But what is Washington’s way? As it stands, no one seems to know. When it comes to exchange design, “the state of play right now is confusion,” says Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. One reason for that confusion is that HHS has already been slow to make rules, missing several early deadlines. Nor is the agency’s track record likely to improve any time soon. In June, Michael Leavitt, HHS secretary under George W. Bush, told ABC News that “the average rule takes 18 months, which means that there are many of those that take two or three years to do, because they have controversy or they require integration with some other rulemaking process.” By June, HHS had already missed multiple early implementation deadlines. Given the volume, complexity, and controversial nature of the new system, it’s a good bet that many of the regulations will continue to be established at a slower pace than planned.

Still, there are clues to what the exchanges will require. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 24 million Americans will eventually get health insurance through the exchanges, including 8 million who will be shifted out of their current private insurance plans. Many of those insurance purchases will be subsidized based on income. Doling out a new set of subsidies on that scale will require a massive new means-testing infrastructure. According to James Capretta, who served in the second Bush administration as the top budget official for health care, Social Security, education, and welfare programs, “the expectation is that these exchanges are able to do real-time income tests on people.”

Verifying eligibility for these subsidies means developing a rapid-response welfare apparatus that has the ability to instantly create detailed, accurate applicant profiles. “These exchanges will have to verify someone’s eligibility for the exchange,” says the Cato Institute’s Cannon. “They’ll have to verify family size and income. They’ll also have to determine if this person is a smoker. And they’ll have to determine where they live, exactly.”

Fast, accurate income verification presents a particularly serious difficulty. For one thing, ObamaCare requires subsidies to be based on family income, not individual income. So the process will have to include multiple family income streams, which means the government will have to check spousal salaries when determining eligibility. Tax returns are the most obvious verification method, but tax returns reveal only what someone made last year. They don’t reflect the mid-year shifts that ObamaCare was intended to address, such as job losses that mean people can no longer obtain insurance through their employers and are newly eligible for subsidies. Yet states will have to create systems to account for such changes. “States are supposed to have data systems in place that can figure out this person’s income and if they’re qualified for federal subsidies and then apply that federal subsidy quickly to the plan of their choosing,” Capretta says. “That is a monumental undertaking. I don’t think anyone has any earthly idea how this is going to happen.”

ObamaCare’s defenders might point to Massachusetts as a model, noting that the Bay State has run a similar insurance exchange since 2006. But Capretta argues that the challenge under the federal system is far greater than anything faced by designers in Boston. For one thing, he notes, the number of people in the Massachusetts exchange is “teeny tiny”—only about 163,000, according to the health policy–focused Kaiser Family Foundation—compared to the millions who are expected to be enrolled nationwide. Furthermore, Massachusetts has relatively few small employers. “Any state that has a huge number of small employers and individual entrepreneurs and small businesses,” Capretta says, is “going to have floods of people into these exchanges.”

In the long run, the biggest potential problem is that the CBO may have underestimated the number of people who will enroll in the exchanges. “CBO says 24 million,” Capretta says. “But it could be three times that.” And, he predicts, “it will almost certainly expand over time.”

The Ever-Growing Burden

One thing guaranteed to expand over time is the Medicaid burden on states. The program, which relies on a combination of state and federal funds to provide bargain-basement health insurance to the poor, already represents a big share of state budgets: In 2009, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, it accounted for 21 percent of total state spending.

Federal funds are matched to state spending, with exact amounts varying by jurisdiction. Prior to the passage of ObamaCare, many states were already struggling to pay their share, even before the recent recession began. In 2003, 23 states faced Medicaid funding shortfalls, and 18 fell short in 2004. In 2008 average state enrollment in Medicaid grew 50 percent faster than expected, and two-thirds of states cut or froze the program’s provider payments. Next year, 30 states are expected to face Medicaid-related shortfalls.

Because federal funding has been pegged to state dollars, cuts—much less large-scale reforms —have been almost impossible. What politician wants to give up two dollars of constituent benefits—especially health benefits—to achieve one dollar in budget cuts?

A massive medical overhaul may have been an opportunity to address Medicaid’s structural problems. Yet rather than reform the struggling program, ObamaCare’s authors decided to double down on it. Starting in 2014, all states will have to expand Medicaid eligibility, allowing into the program any individual who makes less than 133 percent of the federal poverty line. That’s 16 million new enrollees, or half of the total number of newly insured, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. The largest group will be nonelderly, nondisabled adults without dependent children.

To cajole state lawmakers into expanding a program that was already straining their budgets, ObamaCare’s authors offered them a classic salesman’s deal: no money down and no payments for the first three years. From 2014 through 2016, the federal government will pick up the full cost of the mandatory coverage expansion. For the four years afterward, states will pick up a rising share of the tab, leveling off at 10 percent in 2020. It’s essentially a federal-match teaser rate, designed to grease the wheels for political acceptance by delaying the pain.

Given the fact that even in the long term the federal government will still be covering 90 percent of the total bill, you might think the states would welcome an easy cash infusion. But the burden of Medicaid is already so high, and state budgets—most of which are constrained by balanced budget requirements and thus cannot rely on deficit spending—are in such dismal shape, that any additional expenses represent a significant fiscal burden. Florida, for example, is already spending $18 billion a year on Medicaid. ObamaCare will add another $1 billion to the tab by 2019. In Arizona the program is seen as fiscally toxic. Monica Coury, a senior staffer at the Arizona bureaucracy that oversees the state’s Medicaid program, told The Wall Street Journal in July: “We have federal partners talking about expansion of this program. And at the state level, we’re looking at a program that we can’t sustain.” Overall, paying for the added benefits will cost states $21.5 billion by 2020.

Moreover, like so many sales pitches, this one comes with hidden costs; the initial “free” years aren’t actually free. For starters, the law prohibits states from tightening Medicaid eligibility requirements—a typical way to save money during a budget crunch. ObamaCare also fails to cover the administrative costs associated with implementing and running the Medicaid expansion. Heritage’s Haislmaier and his colleague Brian Blase estimate that the extra overhead alone will add nearly $12 billion to the total tab between 2014 and 2020, putting the total additional state burden up to $33.5 billion over the next decade.

Nor does the law cover the cost of expanding coverage to those who qualified for Medicaid prior to 2014 but failed to sign up. Nationwide, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates, nearly 11 million individuals are currently eligible for Medicaid but aren’t enrolled. Many of those individuals are likely to claim their new benefits thanks to what health care experts call the “woodwork effect,” in which people who were hiding out from the previous system suddenly appear when new goodies get added. Most benefit programs fail to capture all eligible individuals, but the greater the benefits offered, the more people show up to take them. And given that individuals who remain uninsured face a yearly penalty, the incentive to collect will likely be stronger than usual.

The law also creates the potential for significant future fiscal headaches by funding temporary pay boosts for doctors who see Medicaid patients. In 2013 and 2014, the law jacks up Medicaid reimbursement rates, which typically run far lower than what health care providers normally charge, to match Medicare rates. But temporary funding is rarely temporary, especially when it comes to health care, where both state and federal politicians, not to mention health care providers, are loathe to accept even long-planned cuts. Each year since 2003, for example, Congress has declined to allow legally mandated cuts to doctors’ Medicare payments, choosing to hike spending “temporarily” instead. And in June, several states launched a panicked last-minute lobbying spree when Congress threatened to end a temporary boost in Medicaid funding provided by last year’s stimulus bill. In many states, then, it’s likely that ObamaCare’s two-year Medicaid reimbursement hike will become an ongoing unfunded mandate.

Medicaid Dropouts?

In response to the bill’s passage, twenty states, led by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, have filed suit against ObamaCare, charging that both its individual insurance mandate and its mountain-sized Medicaid burden are unconstitutional. And Virginia, which prior to Obama-Care’s passage put a law on its books banning health insurance purchase requirements—one of ObamaCare’s key provisions—has filed a separate suit. If successful, the lawsuits could effectively dismantle ObamaCare, but nearly all constitutional scholars, even those supportive of the states, believe the challenges face long odds.

Another option might be for states to ignore federal insurance market guidelines and develop noncompliant exchanges. The idea would be to set up an insurance market that meets local needs, disregarding Washington’s rules, then dare the administration to tinker with an effective locally designed exchange. Doing so, argue Haislmaier and Blase, would “make it politically more difficult for federal officials to implement provisions of the new federal legislation…that will drive up premiums and reduce coverage choices.”

The problem with this plan is that setting up an effective exchange isn’t as easy as it sounds. Massachusetts built an exchange in 2006. But since then, the state has had to deal with constant premium hikes, provider shortages, and legal battles between insurers and state officials. And even if a state built a better system, there’s no guarantee that the administration wouldn’t simply force state officials to comply with the federal regs. In the end, the existence of a government-designed insurance infrastructure, even one crafted to local specifications, makes it significantly easier for the federal government to assert control.

At any rate, neither of those responses would pay off for years. In the meantime, states will have to consider their own bottom lines. Given the heavy burden that ObamaCare places on many states’ finances, some policy experts now believe that the best way to protect budgets may be to drop out of Medicaid entirely. This step would not only rid states of the duty to expand Medicaid; it would free them from what is now their biggest single budgetary obligation.

Politically, this may be a tough sell, but legally there’s little to stop a state from killing the program. Despite the perception that Medicaid is an established part of the entitlement firmament, the program is technically voluntary. Any state willing to give up the federal contribution could close down its program. And thanks to ObamaCare, if a state dropped out after 2014, its poor residents wouldn’t lose access to health coverage; instead, low-income individuals would qualify for subsidized health insurance through the new exchanges, which would still be set up even if a state stopped participating in Medicaid. Indeed, such a system may prove more beneficial for the poor. Medicaid recipients have some of the worst health outcomes in the country; their cancer survival rates, for example, are no better than those of the uninsured. And because of the program’s low reimbursement rates, many health care providers won’t take Medicaid patients. Subsidized private insurance could expand health care options for low-income individuals, improving their health outcomes. That makes it difficult to argue that dropping out of Medicaid would hurt the poor.

State budgets would almost certainly be healthier if they did, at least when judged as independent entities. According to a 2009 report coauthored by Heritage’s Haislmaier and former Medicaid chief Dennis Smith, the collective savings would add up to $725 billion by 2019, based on extrapolations from historical Medicaid spending data. California would save $13.7 billion in the first year alone. Indeed, nearly every state would benefit: By Haislmaier’s most recent estimates, which rely on a combination of Census data and estimates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administrates Medicaid, 40 states and the District of Columbia would be better off shifting their Medicaid recipients off of their books and onto subsidized federal insurance rolls.

“A lot of states might find this very attractive,” says John Goodman, a frequent contributor to the journal Health Affairs and the CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Texas-based free market think tank. “They get to get rid of a program that was going to cost them lots of money.” But he cautions that if every state did it, the total taxpayer burden associated with ObamaCare would increase significantly, perhaps even double.

It’s not much of a choice, but it’s one that state governments will soon have to make. As both liberal and conservative governors around the country are realizing, ObamaCare is a bigger deal than even Joe Biden imagined.

Mrs. Smith
September 16th, 2010 at 11:49 am
Ref the women in his life. This is a great article on that very subject published in the heat of the election by the Asia Times. It deals in part with his dissociation and the imbibing of the anthropologist perspective from his mother

On Palin, I think her role as kingmaker is nothing short of amazing, she certainly has the midas touch with endorsements. Give her 4 to 8 years. Barring any great FUBAR’s she will be quite electable, but let’s have Hillary in 2012 and 2016.

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If Hillary runs and the Clintonistas take back the Dem party, we won’t NEED Palin in 2020; I hope a new Clintonista will be ready to take over.

Palin is a good second choice if Hillary doesnt’ run. And it would be great to see her as the “new face of the GOP” in any case. If she were Hillary’s Gingrich, they could get some good stuff done.

What do you think Palin should do for the next 4-8 years? Wouldn’t the kingmaker thing get old? Tho it’s fun to think about her and Bill running around promoting pawns, er, making kings, getting ready for a big dust-up.

Gee, how many doctors’ and dentists’ offices were cluttered with “well respected” magazines in 2008 who were lacking in truth and fact when they did everything in their power to elevate Obama past Hillary, and Obama past McCain, so that these same talking head authors could then make wads of money writing about the Historical President they just helped install into office????